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 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 EIGHTH SERIES
 
 The Drift of Romanticism 
 
 SHELBURNE ESSAYS 
 EIGHTH SERIES 
 
 By Paul Elmer More 
 
 "It is a question of temperament, or of more or 
 
 less immersion in nature The spiritualist 
 
 finds himself driven to express his faith by a 
 series of scepticisms." — Emerson. 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 ^be CiitierjjiDe ptz^^ €ambxiiiQe
 
 
 COPYRIGHT, I9T3, BY PAUL ELMER MORE 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published March rqij
 
 ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 Of the essays in this volume those on Pater and 
 Nietzsche were first printed, in part, in the 
 Nation and New York Evening Post, and the 
 Nietzsche was afterwards issued as a small book. 
 Some paragraphs of those on Beckford, Newman, 
 and Fiona Macleod are taken from reviews of 
 current publications. The rest of the volume has 
 not before appeared in print.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 To Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. 
 
 Dear Mather, — When the essay on Pater, 
 now in this volume, was first printed in the Na- 
 tion, you, who have been in general so kindly a 
 reader of my work, were honest enough to tell me 
 you did not like it at all. What profit was it, you 
 asked, to take an author whose writing is filled 
 with the subtlest appreciation of the world's 
 beauty, and stretch him on the rack oL^ harsh 
 ethical formula? Why not follow the lure and 
 enjoy the spell of romance wherever it meets the 
 eye? Pater was a lover and confessor of strange 
 souls; should not, then, a true critic come to him 
 in the same receptive spirit? Well, I dare say you 
 were right. I dare say other readers of the essay 
 were right, who, in print and in speech, objected 
 to its severity with less friendly intention. My 
 preface, you see, is a sort of apology for what 
 may seem a lack of sympathetic taste, even of 
 understanding. 
 
 Yet if it is an apology, it is not altogether an 
 admission of wrong-doing. Th.ere_is a kind of 
 criticism that limits itself to looking at the thing 
 in itself, or at the parts of a thing as they succes- 
 sively strike the mind. This is properly the way 
 of sympathy, and those who choose this way are
 
 I 
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 right in saying that it is absurd or merely ill-tem- 
 pered to dwell on what is ugly in a work of art, 
 or false, or incomplete. But there is a place also 
 for .another kind of criticism, which is not so much 
 directed to the individual thing as to its relation 
 with other things, and to its place as cause or 
 effect in a whole group of tendencies. No criti- 
 cism, to be sure, can follow one or the other of 
 these methods exclusively, as no product of art 
 can ever be entirely isolated in its genesis or alto- 
 gether merged in the current of the day. The 
 highest criticism would contrive to balance these 
 methods in such manner that neither the occa- 
 sional merits of a work nor its general influence 
 would be unduly subordinated, and in so far as 
 these essays fail to strike such a balance — I wish 
 this were their only failure — they err sadly from 
 the best model. Yet there are times, are there 
 not? when the general drift of ideas is so domin- 
 ant that a critic may at least be pardoned if, with 
 his eye on these larger relations, he does not bring 
 out quite so clearly as he might the distinguishing 
 marks of the writer or book with which he is im- 
 mediately dealing. And if to his mind this general 
 trend appears to.be carrying the world towards 
 the deso lation of what he holds very dear, you 
 will at least understand how he may come to 
 slight the sounder asprcts of aii>- work which as a 
 whole belongs to the dangerous influences of the 
 age. Now, the romantic movement, beneath all
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 its show of expansion and vitality, seems to me 
 
 at its heart to be just such a drift towards disin- -. 
 
 tegration and disease. In that conviction I have J* 
 
 here treated certain great names more for what 
 
 is typical in them of their age than for what each ^ V 
 
 may have created of pecuhar excellence. i^ 
 
 Yet I would not have you suppose that I am 
 insensible to the beauty of much that these men 
 have written or to the magic that is commonly 
 connected with the term romanticism. Indeed, 
 from one point of view, to admit such insensibility 
 would be to place one's self outside of the appeal 
 of what is highest and purest in all poetry. For 
 it must be observed that the word romanticism is 
 used in two quite different ways, and that the 
 ignorance or neglect of this ambiguity has led to 
 endless confusion of standards. On the one hand, 
 by romantic we often mean, whether rightly or 
 wrongly, certain attributes of poetry of every 
 ^e when it rises from the common level to the 
 climaxes of inspiration — themoments in it when 
 \y;e are thrilled by the indefinable spell of strange- 
 ness wedded to beauty, when we are startled by 
 the unexpected vision of mystery beyond the cir- 
 cle of appearances that wrap us in the dull com- 
 monplace of daily usage, and suddenly "the im- 
 measurable heavens break open to their highest." 
 In that absolute sense of the word there are pas- 
 sages in the poets of antiquity which are as ro- 
 mantic as any to be found in the literature of the
 
 X PREFACE 
 
 nineteenth century. The Odyssey in particular 
 is shot through and through with the sheer won- 
 der of beauty. You will recall, for instance, the 
 three lines of the tenth book when Eurylochus 
 and his band, having left their weeping comrades 
 and penetrated the thick woods of JEsea., reach 
 the lonely house of Circe in the clearing: 
 
 Soon at her vestibule they pause, and hear 
 
 A voice of singing from a lovely place, 
 
 Where Circe weaves her great web year by year.* 
 
 And in the drama you will remember the report 
 of the marvellous end of the errors and sufTerings 
 of CEdipus, when warned by the celestial voice he 
 and Theseus, having bade farewell for a while to 
 their companions, go alone into the grove of Co- 
 lonus to await the mystic translation: 
 
 We beheld 
 The man — nay, we beheld him not again, 
 But Theseus only, with one hand upraised 
 As if to shade his eyes before some fear. 
 Fallen strangely, seen, and not to be endured. 
 
 This Ayorider joined with beauty and this sud- 
 denly appearing awe of the other world are thor- 
 oughly characteristic of the great moments of 
 Greek poetry, and we shall find as pure romance 
 of this sort in the literature historically classic as 
 in the literature historically romantic. The mind 
 closed to this poetic ecstasy may feel itself at 
 home with the so-called pseudo-classical writers, 
 
 • From the translation by P. S. Worseley.
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 but it shall never be free of the society of Tenny- 
 son or Shakespeare or Homer. This is so plain 
 that I cannot see how we gain much critically 
 by insisting on the absolute use of the word 
 romantic, even if, as I much doubt, it has any 
 etymological justification. But there is another 
 use of the word, as it is associated with a definite 
 historical movement of modern Europe, which 
 is freighted with lessons for the critic of letters 
 and life. No age, of course, can be entirely iso- 
 lated. Germs and anticipations of what we call 
 more precisely historical romanticism are easily 
 found here and there before Rousseau and Blake 
 and the German Schlegels, as they all but devel- 
 oped into a complete literature in ancient Alex- 
 andria. In particular no little part of Virgil's 
 appeal to our ears is probably due to his antici- 
 pations of modern sentiment. If any one passage 
 may be singled out as containing the quintessen- 
 tial charm of his genuis, it would be those haunt- 
 ing lines that describe the first voyage of ^neas 
 up the Italian river: 
 
 Soft slide the boats along the Tiber stream: 
 While the waves wonder, and in wonder dream 
 The forests, at the flash of unknown shields. 
 And painted prows that swim the liquid fields. 
 The men, still rowing, tire the night and day; 
 And up the lengthening reaches make their way, 
 Covered by various trees; and as they glide, 
 Cut the green woods upon the placid tide. 
 
 Virgil is the most impossible of all poets to
 
 xii PREFACE 
 
 translate, but it is owing to no treachery on my 
 part that you will detect in this scene hints of 
 that peculiar sentiment which predominates m 
 modern verse — the wonder and strangeness that 
 go with the dissolving together of the human soul 
 and nature, the vague revery that takes the place 
 of insight, the pantheism that has forgotten the 
 true surprise of the supernatural. Nevertheless, 
 at bottom the age of Augustus remained loyal to 
 the classic tradition, and the Mneid was more 
 inspired by the imperial growth of Rome than by 
 the coming dissolution of society. Even those 
 passages in which, as in the lines just quoted, the 
 Alexandrian influence is unmistakable, affect us 
 in the end somehow differently from the same sort 
 of thing in the poets of our own time. The history 
 of that other civilization is closed and its pro- 
 blems are solved; it lies so far back in the past that 
 we may savour the sweetness of its flowers with 
 no disturbing thought of the decay which they 
 concealed. Since Virgil wrote, a great hope and 
 a great despair have traversed the world. 
 
 You will see, then, that in these essays I use the 
 word romantic, not exactly in a narrow sense, for 
 I include much more than the work of the group 
 of literary men who appropriated the name, but 
 in a strictly historical sense, as a convenient 
 term for what I take to be the dominant tendency 
 and admitted ideal of the modern world. Often, 
 indeed, the note of absolute romance breaks
 
 PREFACE /xii 
 
 through the more characteristic music of the 
 clay, and there is a great deal in the nineteenth 
 century which otherwise oversteps the bounds of 
 my definition — that need scarcely be said ; but 
 the more deeply we penetrate into the various 
 practical and intellectual currents of the age, the 
 more clearly do we discern, beneath all their ap- 
 parent divergency, the overmastering force of a 
 common origin and a common direction. If I had 
 to designate very briefly this underlying princi- 
 plewhich gives to historic romance a character- 
 radically different from the mystery and wonder 
 of classic art, I should define it as that expansivF 
 conceit of the emotions which goes with the illu- 
 sion of beholding the infinite within the stream of 
 nature itself instead of apart from the stream. 
 The question r aised finally is thus one of dualism: 
 Is there, or is there not, some element of man's 
 being superior to instinct and reason, some power 
 that acts as a stay upon the flowing impulses of 
 nature^ AYithouX-Whose authoritative check rea- 
 son herself must in the end be swept away in the 
 dissol ution of the everlasting flux? In the Defini- 
 tions of Dualism at the close of this volume I have 
 sought to unfold the consequences of the only 
 answer to this question that comes to me when I 
 listen to the still voice of consciousness. If my 
 language here appears perhaps to be dogmatic 
 and to show disrespect for the terminology of the 
 present-day schools, you will remember that I
 
 xiv PREFACE 
 
 have put down merely a series of definitions and 
 have not purposed to write a treatise. And above 
 all you will absolve me from the presumption of 
 attempting to construct a new system of philoso- 
 phy, and from the folly of aiming to be original 
 where originality would undermine the very basis 
 on which I stand. If I have hearkened to the 
 voice, it is because with this key alone I have 
 been able to find any meaning in my own experi- 
 ence of life, and still more because its admoni- 
 tion seems to me to correspond with the inner 
 core of truth which, however diversified in terms 
 and overlaid with extraneous matter, has been 
 handed down unchanged by that long line of 
 seers and sages, from Plato and Aristotle to the 
 present day, who form what may be called the 
 church universal of the spirit. Sit anima mea cum 
 philosophis. 
 
 You have my apology, my dear Mather, which 
 you will not, I trust, regard as a mere aggrava- 
 tion of the offence it is meant to condone. At any 
 rate, you will be ready to congratulate me on the 
 vow, here recorded, to abjure disputation for a 
 while and to return in the next volume of these 
 essays to the less provocative aspects of litera' 
 ture. 
 
 P. E. M. 
 
 New York, September i, 1912.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Preface vii 
 
 William Beckford i 
 
 Cardinal Newman 37 
 
 Walter Pater 81 
 
 Fiona Macleod 117 
 
 Nietzsche 145 
 
 Huxley 191 
 
 Definitions of Dualism .... 245
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD
 
 The Drift of Romanticism 
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 
 
 If any one were to ask me why I had chosen 
 the master of Fonthill for one of the types of ro- 
 manticism, I am afraid my first answer would 
 have to be, that I had been reading the new vol- 
 ume of his Life and Letters, by Lewis Melville.^ 
 Nor is it even a very good book: on the contrary, 
 Mr. Melville's transcription of the letters shows 
 signs of carelessness; his portrait of the writer 
 suggests an attempt at whitewashing, while 
 his interpretation of Beckford's published works 
 fails to give their real significance in literature. 
 But he has had access in the Charter Room of 
 Hamilton Palace to Beckford's correspondence 
 and papers which were preserved by his surviving 
 daughter, wife of the tenth Duke of Hamilton. 
 The letters, if capriciously edited, give us, never- 
 theless, an insight into Beckford's character, and 
 especially into his formative years, that was quite 
 lacking before. And they are really of consider- 
 able importance in understanding the great revo- 
 lution that remade literature at the beginning of 
 
 * The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill. By Lewis 
 Melville. New York: Duffield & Co. 1910.
 
 4 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 the last century. His early letters fairly teem 
 with suggestions of Rousseau and Werther and 
 Ossian and Chateaubriand, while his Vathek was, 
 as any reader of Byron knows, one of the sources 
 of the Orientalism that went with medievalism 
 and half a dozen other isms into the savourjr^ 
 cauldron of the romantic incantation. But his 
 life was even more influential than his books. 
 Here was a man who had not only the courage but 
 the means also to carry into practice what other 
 men were merely dreaming. He was the richest 
 commoner of England and was willing to squan- 
 der his fortune on an Aladdin's palace, which 
 rose, and fell, like a symbol of the rebellious, as- 
 piring imagination. 
 
 William Beckford was born at Fonthill- 
 Gifi"ard, in Wiltshire, October i, 1760. His 
 father, Alderman and twice Lord Mayor of Lon- 
 don, the celebrated radical and friend of Wilkes, 
 had inherited an enormous estate in Jamaica. 
 His first wife was a widow, with a daughter, 
 Elizabeth March (afterwards Mrs. Hervey), who 
 wrote some foolish sentimental novels which her 
 step-brother William praised as a boy and carica- 
 tured, in Azemia, as a man. The Alderman's 
 second wife, the mother of William, belonged to 
 the Abercorn branch of the Hamilton family. 
 One of the Alderman's brothers, William's uncle 
 Julines, had a son Peter, who married, in 1773, 
 Louisa Pitt, second daughter of Lord Rivers. For
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 5 
 
 Mrs. Peter Beckford and her sister, apparently 
 Marcia-Lucy who in 1789 married James Fox- 
 Lane of Bramham Park (Mr. Melville leaves these 
 relationships somewhat in confusion), William 
 had a profound attachment. From the very be- 
 ginning the boy was subject to influences that 
 shaped his life to its peculiar end. His father, 
 the great Alderman, was, as history presents 
 him, a clear-sighted man of affairs, yet there 
 must somewhere be a twist in the mind of a man 
 who clings to an overblown estate, including 
 many thousands of slaves, and who at the same 
 time alUes himself with a movement which leads 
 naturally to the belief that all property is theft. 
 ^Tien only ten, William lost his father and fell 
 largely under the management of his mother, and 
 of other women, notably his step-sister and Mrs. 
 Peter Beckford, who ejncouraged him in the wild- 
 est broodings and most fantastic dreams. At this 
 age, instead of undergoing the wholesome disci- 
 pline of public school and university, he was, by 
 the advice of his godfather. Lord Chatham, 
 placed under the tutelage of the Rev. John Let- 
 tice, who may have been a scholarly and other- 
 wise sensible man, but at least w as un able_to 
 drag the boy out of the world of revery into which 
 he had fallen. When seventeen he went with 
 Lettice as "bear-leader" to Geneva, where he 
 continued his studies for a year and a half, 
 travelling at intervals and seeing among other
 
 6 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 celebrities the aged Voltaire, who bestowed on 
 the lad one of his ever-ready blessings. From 
 Geneva we have the first of his letters, some of 
 them addressed in the transcription to his step- 
 sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Hervey, others appar- 
 ently to the same person. The tenor of the boy's 
 musings may be gathered from an extract: 
 
 Dark Clouds roll from the North and bring on the 
 Night. I see lights at a distance moving towards the 
 City; perhaps some one is there, who will direct me to 
 the Gate. I call . . . ; ^ but the bellowing of the tide 
 deadens my Voice. I am alone on the Shore . . . dread 
 is my situation. . . . The blasts increase and wistle 
 dismally in my ears. I shudder. . . . What shriek was 
 that? — no Bird is on the wing! ... I must hasten 
 home, and yet such is the darkness that I may wander 
 for hours and not find the path that leads to the Gate 
 next the port. I tremble, and of what am I afraid? — 
 ah ! too well I know what means those shades, for surely 
 I beheld something flit before me pale as the Ashes of an 
 Altar. Something roze on a Wave and sighed. See it 
 rears itself again and moans — it moans. — O how am I 
 deceived or that shade wears the resemblance of one that 
 is no more and that was most dear to me ... cruel illu- 
 sion. Think, another wave rose, foamed at my feet, cast 
 its spray on high and offered to my affrighted Imagina- 
 tion a form like yours. 
 
 That is the sort of thing Ossian was doing in 
 young generous minds. 
 
 At the end of 1778 Beckford was back in Eng- 
 land, pouring out his wild revolt in letters from 
 
 • There is nothing here or elsewhere to indicate whether these points 
 are in the original or mean an excision made by the editor.
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 7 
 
 Fonthill — for instance: " I will seclude myself if 
 possible from the World, in the midst of the Em- 
 pire, and converse many hours every day with 
 you, Mesron and Nouronihar"; and satisfying 
 his sense of grotesque humour by writing his first 
 book, Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary 
 Painters, which, for the benefit of the house- 
 keeper at Fonthill who showed strangers through 
 the galleries, attributed the pictures to such 
 artists as Og of Basan, Watersouchy of Amster- 
 dam, Herr Sucrewasser of Vienna, and the like. 
 Mr. Melville seems to see a contradiction in this 
 union of sentiment and burlesque in the same 
 mind ; they are in fact but different aspects of the 
 same desire to escape from reality and have often 
 gone together, from the days of the double theme 
 in Spanish drama to the magnificent audacities 
 of Don Juan. 
 
 After a year and a half Beckford was ofif with 
 his tutor on the grand tour. This lasted for about 
 two years, and was interrupted by his return to 
 England to celebrate his coming of age. In May 
 of 1782 he went abroad for the third time, travel- 
 ling now with all the state that befitted one who 
 had come into control of an enormous fortune. 
 Some time in the interval between his second 
 and third journeys he had met at Bath Lady 
 Margaret Gordon, with whom he fell in love and 
 whom he married May 5, 1783, coming back to 
 England for this purpose. Two children were
 
 8 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 born to them; but after a union of three years 
 his wife died, and the children, seeming, so far 
 as the letters indicate, to have passed quite out 
 of his mind, were placed under the charge of 
 his mother, while he himself was hurried about 
 Europe by his friends who, according to his biog- 
 rapher, were "fearful of his losing his reason or 
 taking his life." Mr. Melville also asserts that 
 "the marriage had been an ideal union," and 
 thinks that the memory of his loss, "acting upon 
 an emotional nature, may have had more to do 
 with his subsequent retirement than is generally 
 supposed." It may be so, yet such practical en- 
 durance of grief scarcely accords with the ro- 
 mantic temperament, as one reads the annals of 
 those days ; and indeed there is an aspect of this 
 whole affair which is unpleasantly suggestive, but 
 which cannot be entirely passed over without a 
 gross misrepresentation of what Beckford stood 
 for to his contemporaries. During his first visit 
 abroad he was writing to some unnamed corre- 
 spondent, probably either his step-sister, Mrs. 
 Hervey, or his cousin by marriage, Mrs. Peter 
 Beckford, in a mingled vein of high-flown ego- 
 tism and love which may have meant almost 
 anything. And again during his second journey, 
 still before he had met Lady Margaret Gordon, 
 his letters are filled with disquieting confessions. 
 At the outset we find him writing from Margate 
 to a correspondent unnamed: "Envy me, for I
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 9 
 
 am going to be wrapped in the arms of Darkness 
 and Illusions." And then follows a series of let- 
 ters to Mrs. Peter Beckford, which leave little 
 doubt of part of the story at least: 
 
 Would to God [he writes from Spa] the memorable 
 Fountains of Merlin were still attainable — I might 
 then be happy with the hopes of forgetting a passion 
 which preys upon my soul. I cannot break my chains 
 
 — I struggle and the more attempts I make to shake 
 them ofif the firmer they adhere to me. This wayward 
 Love of mine makes me insensible to everything — I 
 move feverishly from place to place — but it is in vain 
 
 — it pursues me — pursues me with such swiftness! 
 seizes upon me and marks me for its own. . . . Deli- 
 cious Hours that are gone for ever. Your recollection 
 is my sole comfort. I live by your remembrance. 
 
 Were this all it would mean no more than any 
 fantastic and unwholesome passion, but in the 
 letters written to the same person during his 
 third journey, that is while he was courting Lady 
 Margaret, apparently against the will of her rela- 
 tives, there are a number of passages which can 
 be explained only by assuming a double or triple 
 passion of a sort that is as bewildering as it is 
 ofTensi\-c. I will not quote at large from these 
 let^exs, because their tone is not precisely edify- 
 ing And because also I frankly do not entirely 
 understand the situation. It is enough to indi- 
 cate the transaction by a few words from the 
 close of the letter of August 7, 1782:
 
 10 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 At Christmas may not I hope to possess you at Font- 
 hill and tell you again and again that you have never 
 been absent from my thoughts? Convey the enclosed 
 
 to . She has written me a Letter that leaves me not 
 
 the smallest doubt of her affection. The flame spreads, 
 I perceive — you told me it would. 
 
 Mr, Melville gives no explanation of the oppo- 
 sition to Beckford's marriage. It should seem 
 that, if his conduct corresponded with his words, 
 there were reasons grave enough why an alliance 
 with him might be regarded as undesirable. Beck- 
 ford himself wrote to the Rev. Samuel Henley, 
 thanking him for silencing "the hiss of serpents 
 at Fonthill," and declaring that "neither Or- 
 lando nor Brandi were ever more tormented by 
 demons and spectres in an enchanted castle than 
 ^William Beckford in his own hall by his nearest 
 5 relatives." It might be hinted that a serpent is 
 . I generally to be found in such a morbid paradise_ 
 / as this young gentleman sought to create about 
 [^himself. 
 
 Of the still uglier rumours about Beckford's 
 life I should prefer not even to hint. Mr. Melville 
 declares categorically that there is not a particle 
 of evidence to support them, and dismisses them 
 as preposterous. That may be true; I trust it is. 
 Yet Mr. Melville himself admits that Beckford's 
 Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents, printed 
 at this time, was probably withdrawn from circu- 
 lation because its romantic tendency might give 

 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD ii 
 
 some colour to the stories about the author. He 
 does not cite, as indeed there was no need to cite, 
 Byron's letter on Beckford. He does, however, 
 give Samuel Rogers's vivid description of a visit 
 to Fonthill in a letter to Byron dated February 8, 
 1818: 
 
 I was in that country [Wiltshire] the other day, and 
 paid a visit to the Abbot of Fonthill. The woods re- 
 called Vallombrosa, the Abbey the Duomo at Milan, 
 and, as for its interior, the length of the galleries (only 
 think of 330 feet), the splendour of the cabinets, and 
 the magical illusions of light and shade, realized all my 
 visions. Then he played and sung; and the effect was 
 singular — like the pealings of a distant choir, now swell- 
 ing, now dying away. He read me his travels in Portu- 
 gal, and the stories related in that small chamber in the 
 Palace of Eblis. 
 
 Having quoted so much, and having added part 
 of Rogers's account of the visit in his Tahle-Talk, 
 Mr. Melville in fairness should have added 
 Rogers's comment on those unpublished episodes ^ 
 designed for Vathek: "They are extremely fine, 
 but very objectionable, on account of their sub- 
 
 * Since this essay was written Mr. Melville has published these tales 
 from the MS. found at Hamilton Palace (The Episodes of Vathek, with 
 a translation by Sir Frank T. Marzials; London: Stephen Swift & Co., 
 1912). The best of them. The Story of Zulkais, deals with the incestu- 
 ous love of a twin brother and sister. " We were plunged," says the hero- 
 ine, " both successively and together, into a hell-broth wiiich was in- 
 tended to impart to us a strength and intelligence more than human, 
 but has only instilled, into our veins the ardent ehxir of a too exquisite 
 sensibility, and the poison of an insatiable desire." The events that fol- 
 low this magic immersion at birth are related with great power of gro- 
 tesque invention.
 
 12 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 jects. Indeed, they show that the mind of the 
 author was, to a certain degree, diseased." 
 
 But enough of this subject, which might have 
 been passed over altogether in an essay, were it 
 not that Beckford has a place in literature largely 
 for the very things which his biographer repre- 
 sents him not to have been. It is pleasanter, and 
 not less significant, to turn to the Aladdin-like 
 retreat from the world which Rogers, the con- 
 noisseur, found so fascinating. I follow Mr. 
 Melville's narrative closely. 
 
 One of the reasons for Beckford 's return to 
 England, in 1781, from the grand tour was, as I 
 have said, that he might celebrate his coming of 
 age in a manner befitting the fame of Fonthill. 
 The festivities, which lasted for a week, followed 
 the usual custom of the day, and might be dis- 
 missed with a word, except for the fact that they 
 seem to have been one of the influences that 
 shaped the rest of his life : 
 
 My spirits are not sufficiently rampant [he writes to 
 Lady Hamilton] to describe the tumult of balls, con- 
 certs and illuminations in which we were engaged here 
 
 a fortnight ago Above ten thousand people all 
 
 neatly dressed covered the lawn and the hills which rise 
 over it. The glory of bright blue coats and scariet far- 
 thingales made the distant slopes as gay as a field of 
 
 poppies The view from the noble portico of the 
 
 house presented that of a great piazza 600 feet by 460 
 feet. Most travellers were reminded of the area of St. 
 Peter's, and you may imagine the thousands and thou-
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 13 
 
 sands of lamps that shone forth as soon as it was 
 evening did not destroy the illusion. The bold spaces of 
 the colonnades and loftiness of the portico certainly 
 favoured it. On the desert down which terminates 
 the woody region of Fonthill blazed a series of fires. 
 Their light was doubtless the reverse of mournful, 
 but still perhaps you would have thought of Troy and 
 the funeral of Hector. Every now and then the shouts 
 of the populace and the sound of the wind instruments 
 filled the air. At intervals mortars were discharged and 
 a girandola of rockets burst into clear bluish stars 
 that cast a bright light for miles. On the left of the 
 house rises a lofty steep mantled with tall oaks amongst 
 which a temple of truly classical design discovers it- 
 self. This building (sacred to the Lares) presented a con- 
 tinued glow of safTron-coloured flame, and the throng 
 assembled before it looked devilish by contrast. 
 
 These scenes at Fonthill, ending with the ne- 
 cessary touch of diaboUsm, sound almost like a 
 chapter of Vathek, and indeed they certainly 
 combined with Beckford's early reading of the 
 Arabian Nights and later acquaintance with the 
 Oriental tales then popular in France to inspire 
 that strange book. He himself gave this explan- 
 ation to Cyrus Redding, and declared that the 
 great Hall at Fonthill, with its many doors 
 opening into dim corridors, suggested to him the 
 idea of the Hall of Eblis. But the magnificent 
 building, which had been erected by his father 
 in 1755 on the site of an old mansion supposed to 
 have been designed by Inigo Jones, did not long 
 content the new master. For twenty years he
 
 14 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 found his amusement in superintending the erec- 
 tion of a new group of buildings, which was one 
 of the marvels of the age. So impatient was he of 
 the inevitable delays of building that at one time 
 the royal works at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, 
 were interrupted by the drafting of some five 
 hundred men to labour in continuous gangs at 
 Fonthill. By night the work was pushed on by 
 torchlight, often under the immediate direction 
 of the owner. It is characteristic of the man and 
 the age that he should have offered a humanitar- 
 ian excuse for his caprice, saying that his purpose 
 was to give employment to workingmen in dis- 
 tress; but it is not very intelligent in his bio- 
 grapher to accept such a pretext on its face value. 
 The methods and the result set the tongues of 
 England a- wag ; and no wonder. Here was a man 
 endowed with what seemed then unlimited 
 wealth, who was ready to satisfy his whimsical 
 taste and disorganized fancy, at any expense, in 
 timber and cement. It was as if some one in that 
 staid century had gained control over a group of 
 genii out of the Arabian Nights and had set them 
 to raising a magic structure for his delectation. 
 It was some time soon after Beckford had begun 
 on his extravagant project that Coleridge dreamt 
 of his Oriental palace : 
 
 In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
 A stately pleasure-dome decree. . . . 
 So twice five miles of fertile ground 
 With walls and towers were girdled round:
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 15 
 
 And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills, 
 Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; 
 And here were forests ancient as the hills, 
 Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. 
 
 The poet's dream was inspired by a description in 
 Purchas' Pilgrimage, but it is likely that the 
 rumour of the wild doings at Fonthill also en- 
 tered into his vision. Of the character of Beck- 
 ford's pleasure-dome, with its intricate galleries 
 and spacious halls, and innumerable chambers 
 devoted to every refinement of luxury, and with 
 its heterogeneous collection of rare treasures, 
 I shall attempt to give no description. The 
 dominating feature of the design was a great 
 tower which rose three hundred feet from the 
 ground. It was built in such haste that the wind 
 one day, catching a large flag on the summit, 
 brought the whole flimsy thing down in ruins. 
 Nothing daunted, the owner ran up a second 
 tower in its place, and this, too, crumbled to the . 
 earth in 1825, after the estate had been sold into 
 other hands. The whole thing is like a chapter in; 
 romanticism written in wood and mortar. ' 
 
 Of the life of the master in his magic palace 
 strange stories were soon current. About the 
 whole park he raised a twelve-foot wall of some 
 seven or eight miles in length. His own explana- 
 tion of this work was that he purposed to keep the 
 neighbouring gentry from riding to hounds over 
 his land; but it scarcely seems that twelve feet of
 
 i6 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 masonry was necessary for such an end. The fact 
 is that Beckford had developed something not 
 unhke a mania for seclusion. His biographer 
 tries to combat such a notion, and no doubt some 
 of the stories of his devices to keep the world 
 away were exaggerated or invented. Such, per- 
 haps, is the anecdote of the stranger who got 
 within the park and mistaking Beckford for a 
 gardener asked to be shown about the grounds. 
 This the owner is said to have done, and then, 
 after disclosing his identity, and dining with the 
 stranger, retired and sent a servant with the mes- 
 sage: "Mr. Beckford ordered me to present his 
 compliments to you, Sir, and I am to say that as 
 you found your way into Fonthill Abbey without 
 assistance, you may find your way out again as 
 best you can ; and he hopes you will take care to 
 avoid the bloodhounds that are let loose in the 
 gardens every night. I wish you good evening." 
 The incident has been well vouched for, but 
 Beckford himself denied it, or at least gave it 
 quite an innocent turn, and I am willing to let it 
 pass. Another story of similar import, however, 
 comes to us in his own words and cannot be gain- 
 said. The Duchess of Gordon may have been 
 a bold, inquisitive creature, as duchesses have 
 a right to be, but her reception at Fonthill was 
 certainly not such as duchesses expect. Beckford 
 relates the adventure to his friend Redding:
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 17 
 
 Fonthill was put in order for her reception, with 
 everything I could desire to receive her magnificently 
 
 — not only to receive her, but to turn the tables on her 
 for the presumption she had that I was to become the 
 plaything of her purposes. . . . My arrangements being 
 made, I ordered my major-domo to say, on the Duchess's 
 arrival, that it was unfortunate — everything being 
 arranged for her Grace's reception, Mr. Beckford had 
 shut himself up on a sudden, a way he had at times, and 
 that it was more than his place was worth to disturb 
 him, as his master only appeared when he pleased, for- 
 bidding interruption, even if the King came to Fonthill. 
 I had just received a new stock of books, and had them 
 removed to the room of which I had taken possession. 
 The Duchess conducted herself with great equanimity, 
 and seemed much surprised and gratified at what she 
 saw, and the mode of her reception — just as I desired 
 she should be. When she got up in the morning her first 
 question was, "Do you think Mr. Beckford will be 
 visible to-day?" "I cannot inform your Grace — Mr. 
 Beckford's movements are so very uncertain — it is 
 possible. Would your Grace take an airing in the Park? 
 
 — a walk in the gardens?" Everything which Fonthill 
 could supply was made the most of, whetting her appe- 
 tite to her purpose still more. 
 
 After seven or eight days of this treatment the 
 Duchess departed, and Beckford remarks that he 
 "never enjoyed a joke so much." 
 
 I see no reason why we should not accept the 
 common tradition of Beckford's craze for isola-j 
 tion, and indeed any one who is famiUar withl 
 human nature, and particularly human natures ^ 
 under the warping stress of uncontrolled emo- \ 
 tions, would prophesy, from the young man's «
 
 i 
 
 i8 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 outcry for sympathy and from his complaints of 
 the world's inability to appreciate him, that just 
 J such a loveless, lonely old age would be his end. 
 Some connection with society he no doubt main- 
 tained, occasional visits were received; but on 
 the whole the picture one gets of the recluse in 
 his Palace of Art, surrounded by the spoils of the 
 world, is oppressive and morbid. In time Beck- 
 ford's shrinking fortune grew unable to stand the 
 strain put upon it, and he was obhged in 1822 
 to dispose of Fonthill. The sale of the collections 
 was one of the much-bruited events of the day, 
 and Mr. Melville quotes from an amusing skit 
 in the Times which describes the throng of buy- 
 ers and sightseers: 
 
 He is fortunate who finds a vacant chair within 
 twenty miles of Fonthill; the solitude of a private apart- 
 ment is a luxury which few can hope for, . . . Falstaff 
 himself could not take his ease at this moment within a 
 dozen leagues of Fonthill. . . . The beds through the 
 county are (literally) doing double duty — people who 
 come in from a distance during the night must wait to 
 
 go to bed until others get up in the morning Not a 
 
 farmhouse — however humble — not a cottage near 
 Fonthill, but gives shelter to fashion, to beauty, and 
 rank; ostrich feathers, which, by their very waving, we 
 can trace back to Piccadilly, are seen nodding at a case- 
 ment window over a dispopulated poultry-yard. 
 
 Beckford now retired to Bath, where at Lans- 
 down he reared a miniature Fonthill, with a tower 
 one hundred and thirty feet high, ending in a
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD xg 
 
 cast-iron model of the Temple of Lyslcrates at 
 Athens. At Bath he became a notable figure, and 
 his eccentricities, if nothing more, were the occa- 
 sion of endless scandals. "Surmises were current 
 about a brood of dwarfs that vegetated in an 
 apartment built over the archway connecting his 
 two houses; and the vulgar, rich and poor alike, 
 gave a sort of half-credit to cabalistical mon- 
 strosities invoked in that apartment." Mr. Mel- 
 ville adds that the brood of dwarfs consisted in 
 reality of one poor waif whom Beckford had 
 picked up in Italy. '"What do you think of him, 
 eh? Oh, he's a strange thing, is n't he?' his mas- 
 ter said to a visitor at Lansdown, adding in an 
 unearthly voice, in allusion to the rumours in the 
 town below, ' He is a Giaour, and feeds upon toad- 
 stools! ' " It is n't just an agreeable jest. 
 
 Beckford died in 1844 at the age of eighty- 
 three. He was a man of many accomplishments 
 and a vein of true genius, one of the great per- 
 sonalities of the age, and in his virtues as well as 
 his errors a striking type of the romantic enthusi- 
 asms that in his early formative years were 
 springing up all over Europe. As the keynote to 
 his character Mr. Melville quotes his saying, "I 1 
 have never known a moment's ennuis It is pos- f 
 sibly true; if so his salvation was due to an inex-/ / 
 haustible fund of inherited health, for certainly the' 
 natural outcome of his mode of life was solitude, 
 and self-devouring thought, and infinite weariness.
 
 20 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 The word romanticism has been employed so 
 variously, it has been so bandied back and forth 
 by those who admire and those who condemn, 
 and has been associated with so many practical 
 questions, that one feels to-day a certain hesi- 
 tancy in bringing it into criticism at all. Yet the 
 very fact of its persistent use, even its misuse, 
 shows that it touches one of the deep-seated 
 traits of human nature, and proves that those 
 who try to explain it away as unmeaning are 
 depriving us of a real and powerful instrument 
 of classification. Where lie the springs of this 
 movement? whence does the spirit of what we 
 call romanticism arise, and what has been its 
 course? It has run like a river down through 
 many ages, now contracted into a narrow cur- 
 rent, now spreading out like a sea. It has been 
 fed by countless contributary streams, so that 
 its origin may easily be forgotten; yet if we ex- 
 amine closely, we shall see, I believe, that it still, 
 through all the changes and additions of time, 
 bears the mark that it took from its source. For 
 that source we must go back to the remote begin- 
 nings of our era, and look into the obscure mingling 
 of Oriental and Occidental civilization which fol- 
 lowed the invasion of Alexander's army into Asia, 
 and which, under the all-merging sway of the Ro- 
 man Empire, created a new faith and a new world : 
 more definitely, we must look into the confluence 
 of Eastern religion and Western philosophy.
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 21 
 
 And here I must beg for a little indulgence. 
 One may well hesitate in a literary essay to deal 
 with such high-sounding metaphysical terms as 
 infinity and personality, yet I see no way of ap- 
 proaching the riddle before us — and romanti- 
 cism is the great riddle of literature — without as 
 clear a notion as we can get of what those ideas 
 were in the Oriental and the Occidental mind, 
 and what their coming together meant. As for 
 the first, there is not so much difficulty. It is a 
 commonplace that to the people of the East inj 
 general the emotion of the vast and the vague I 
 was associated with the divine; the mere escape 1 
 from bounds, which was implied in exaggeration, | 
 conveyed to them an intimation of infinity in the I 
 absolute sense of complete independence of the___^J 
 finite. And so we see in their religious poetry a 
 constant effort to overwhelm the imagination 
 with enormous numbers and magnitudes, and in 
 their idols an attempt to portray the gods by dis- 
 tortion and grotesqueness or by some quality 
 that exceeds the human. On the contrary, the 
 people of the West, at least in so far as Greece 
 may be said to have been their spokesman, had 
 developed an inherent repugnance to the infinite, 
 or the apeiron, as expressed in mere boundless- 
 ness. To them the divine was rather to be 
 sought in the qualities of restraint and limitation 
 and proportion. Their ideal is conveyed in the 
 word autarkeia, in that self-completeness which
 
 22 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 seeks to convey the sense of pure infinity, not 
 by the suggestion of vague unUmited forces for- 
 ever striving for expansion, but by absolute con- 
 trol at the centre. One need only contrast Homer 
 with any of the Sacred Books of the East, or a 
 statue of Apollo with any of the idols of the 
 Barbarians, to learn how strongly and concretely 
 this difference in attitude towards the infinite 
 worked itself out. This law of aiitarkeia, in fact, 
 this perception of the veritable infinite within 
 harmonious self-completeness, was the great gift 
 of the Greeks to civilization, the greatest gift 
 of all, so unique in character, so subtle in prac- 
 tice, so difficult to maintain, that to this day he 
 who would find the law in its purity is obliged to 
 go back to school at Athens and there labori- 
 ously learn it as a lesson. This is the law that 
 Goethe discovered in the phrase of Pindar, 
 epikratein dynasthai, tjie power of control, and that 
 seemed to him to reveal the principle of his na- 
 ture and to furnish a rule against the extrava- 
 gances of romanticism. We but deceive ourselves 
 if we think the modern world can offer anything 
 to take the place of that discipline. 
 
 With this difference of Oriental and Occiden- 
 tal sentiment towards the infinite went a cor- 
 responding difference in regard to the notion 
 of personality. To the Western mind the sense 
 of the Ego, as an active emotional entity, was 
 sharply defined and the last thing to be given
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 23 
 
 up. The Oriental, on the contrary, never at- 
 tained to a clear conception of this entity, and in 
 his mind it had a tendency always to dissolve 
 away into a mere name for an ephemeral group 
 of sensations. One of the Pali books, the Milinda- 
 panha, records a number of conversations which 
 took place, or were supposed to have taken place, 
 between Milinda, the Greek king Menander, 
 who ruled over Alexander's dominion of Bactria, 
 and the Buddhist sage, Nagasena. One of these 
 discussions turns on the existence of a separate 
 personality, and is so pertinent to the matter in 
 question that I may be excused if I quote from 
 it at some length : ' 
 
 Then drew near Milinda the king to where the 
 venerable Nagasena was; and having drawn near, he 
 greeted the venerable Nagasena ; and having passed the 
 compliments of friendship and civility, he sat down 
 respectfully at one side. And the venerable Nagasena 
 returned the greeting; by which, verily, he won the 
 heart of King Milinda. 
 
 And Milinda the king spoke to the venerable Na- 
 gasena as follows: 
 
 " How is your reverence called? Bhante, what is your 
 name?" 
 
 "Your majesty, I am called Nagasena; my fellow- 
 priests, your majesty, address me as Nagasena: but 
 whether parents give one the name Nagasena, or Su- 
 rasena, or Virasena, or Sihasena, it is, nevertheless, 
 your majesty, but a way of counting, a term, an appel- 
 
 » The translation is by Henry Clarke Warren in his Buddhism in 
 Translations. Cambridge, Mass. 1896.
 
 24 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 lation, a convenient designation, a mere name, this Na- 
 gasena; for there is no Ego here to be found." 
 
 At this the Greek cries out in astonishment 
 and begins to question the sage. He forces Na- 
 gasena to concede that he, this Nagasena who is 
 talking, is not identical with the hair of his head, 
 nor his nails, nor his teeth, nor his flesh, nor any 
 other part of his body; and if there is no separate 
 Ego, where then is the man himself? " Bhante," 
 he concludes, "although I question you very 
 closely, I fail to discover any Nagasena. Verily, 
 now, bhante, Nagasena is a mere empty sound. 
 What Nagasena is there here? Bhante, you speak 
 a falsehood, a lie: there is no Nagasena." To this 
 argument the Hindu replies by a parallel reductio 
 ad absurdum : 
 
 "Your majesty, you are a delicate prince, an exceed- 
 ingly delicate prince; and if, your majesty, you walk in 
 the middle of the day on hot sandy ground, and you 
 tread on rough grit, gravel, and sand, your feet become 
 sore, your body tired, the mind is oppressed, and the 
 body-consciousness suffers. Pray, did you come afoot, 
 or riding?" 
 
 " Bhante, I do not go afoot: I came in a chariot." 
 
 "Your majesty, if you came in a chariot, declare to 
 me the chariot. Pray, your majesty, is the pole the 
 chariot?" 
 
 "Nay, verily, bhante." 
 
 "Is the axle the chariot?" 
 
 "Nay, verily, bhante." 
 
 "Are the wheels the chariot?" 
 
 "Nay, verily, bhante."
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 25 
 
 "Is the chariot-body the chariot?" 
 
 "Nay, verily, bhante." 
 
 And so through the banner staff, the yoke, and 
 the other parts of the chariot, with the admir- 
 able conclusion that if none of these members is 
 the chariot, there is no chariot at all, and the 
 king must really have walked. In this way he is 
 compelled to admit that the term chariot is 
 merely a convenient designation for the assem- 
 bly of pole, axle, wheels, chariot-body, and ban- 
 ner staff. Whereupon Nagasena draws the les- 
 son: 
 
 "Thoroughly well, your majesty, do you understand 
 a chariot. In exactly the same way, your majesty, in 
 respect of me, Nagasena is but a way of counting, term, 
 appellation, convenient designation, mere name for the 
 hair of my head, hair of my body, . . . brain of the 
 head, form, sensation, perception, the predispositions, 
 and consciousness. But in the absolute sense there is 
 no E go here to be found." 
 
 We need not stop to analyze this argument, 
 and show how, by the same logic, each member 
 of the chariot or the man can be analyzed into 
 its constituent parts, and these parts still fur- 
 ther reduced, until nothing is left but absolute 
 vacuity, — a conclusion which some of the later 
 Buddhists did not hesitate to accept. The point 
 is the^^ifferent attitude of the Greek and the 
 Oriental towards that mysterious entity of hu- 
 man nature which we call the Ego or the person- 
 ality.
 
 26 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Now it was the great work of the first Chris- 
 tian centuries to merge the Oriental and Occi- 
 dental conceptions of infinity and personality 
 together in a strange and fruitful union. Such an 
 amalgamation might have resulted in the reten- 
 tion of the more difficult term on each side, in 
 the union, that is, of the Greek notion of the in- 
 finite and the Oriental notion of impersonality. 
 Plato, in fact, and Plato, perhaps alone of phil- 
 osophers, did somehow come to effect a recon- 
 ciliation of this sort; and Emerson shows true in- 
 sight in making this the kernel of his doctrine. 
 But in the historical alliance of West and East 
 under the Roman Empire the easier way was fol- 
 lowed, and we can actually see the Occidental 
 sense of the Ego merging with the Oriental sense 
 of vastness and vagueness, of infinity as akin to 
 the mere escape from limitation. To that alli- 
 ^/ ance, if to any definite event of history, we may 
 trace the birth of our sense of an infinite, insati- 
 able personality, that has brought so much self- 
 torment and so much troubled beauty into the 
 religion and literature of the modern world. 
 Christianity was soon to give a precise and fa- 
 mous illustration of this new birth in the desper- 
 ate dispute of the homoousians and the homoi- 
 ousians, who in the fourth century almost rent 
 the Church in twain over the question whether 
 the persons of the Godhead were of the same or 
 -fr'*^^ only of similar essence. Such a debate would
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 27 
 
 have been foolishness to the Greek and madness 
 to the early Hindu. 
 
 No doubt in stating the case thus succinctly I 
 have passed over many contributing causes, and 
 in especial I have too much simplified the com- 
 plex nature of the Orient — certain traits of the 
 Semitic peoples, for instance, are far removed 
 from the Hinduism which I have taken as typ- 
 ical of the Aryan East. Yet in essentials the 
 source of romanticism is to be found, I think, in 
 such a product of Oriental religion and Occiden- 
 tal philosophy as I have attempted to describe, 
 And_the place where this alliance was consum- 
 mated is the city on the Delta of the Nile which 
 Alexander created to be the capital of his vast 
 new empire. Alexandrianism has come to be a 
 word of reproach, but at least it must be ad- 
 mitted that the intellectual activity of that city, 
 and especially the activities that centred about 
 its great library, make the life of most of our mod- 
 ern universities seem in comparison barren and 
 insignificant. How many new literary forms and 
 philosophical schools and religious sects origin- 
 ated among that people which was drawn to- 
 gether by avarice or ambition from every quar- 
 ter of the known world ! And it will be observed 
 that almost all of these have a distinctly roman- 
 tic tinge. Here was developed Neo-Platonism, 
 which is nothing more than a conversion — a per- 
 version one might almost say, considering what 
 
 ■/
 
 28 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 confusion of ideas it wrought in philosophy 
 through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 
 9^^ ( — a change, at least, of Plato's intellectual mys- 
 
 i^ Vw ticism into a bastard emotional mysticism. The 
 
 pastoral poem was born in Alexandria, or was 
 early adopted there, as was the tale of idealized 
 love. There the epic began to assume its roman- 
 tic form, as may be seen in the work of Apollo- 
 nius Rhodius, one of the masters of the library. 
 It would be easy to go through the Argonautica^ 
 and select any number of passages which show 
 how the new spirit was struggling to free itself 
 from the old form. As an example take the six 
 verses of the third book which depict the meet- 
 ing of Jason and Medea: 
 
 Silent awhile and dumb they stood together. 
 I As on the mountain-side tall oaks or firs 
 Deep-rooted stand, and in the windless weather 
 Emit no sound, but when the light wind stirs 
 Break into infinite murmurs, so these twain, 
 Moved by the breath of Love, to speech grew fain. 
 
 It is not due to my translation, but to the sub- 
 stance of the lines, that they have more the tone 
 of William Morris than of Homer. 
 
 These things are all significant of the wide- 
 spread revolution in sentiment of which Alex- 
 andria was the chief centre and workshop; they 
 are straws on the surface, so to speak, that tell 
 which way the current is flowing. To learn what 
 was taking place 4own in the depths one must 
 look into the wild amalgamation of Eastern and
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 29 
 
 Western religious creeds that was sending out a 
 stream of Gnostic and Manichean heresies and 
 threatening to overwhelm, as indeed they largely 
 modified, the orthodox faith. A good example 
 of these feverish creations has come down to us 
 in the farrago of superstition and philosophy 
 taught by the Alexandrian Valentinus in the sec- 
 ond century. Do not fear that I shall attempt to 
 carry you through the awful heights and depths 
 of that Gnostic nightmare as it is shudderingly 
 expounded by St. Irenaeus; a sentence or two will 
 be sufficient. To explain the creation of the world 
 Valentinus had borrowed and adapted an ela- 
 borate system of ^ons, or mystical powers, who 
 dwell aloft somewhere in couples or syzygies, in a 
 state of matrimonial confusion which I have never 
 been able to disentangle. "The last and youngest 
 of the duodecad," to quote St. Irenaeus rather 
 freely, "was the ^on called Sophia [Wisdom], 
 the daughter of Anthropos and Ekklesia. And 
 Sophia fell into a passion without the embrace 
 
 of her syzygy who is Theletos [the Will] 
 
 Now this passion of hers was a search for the 
 Father, for she longed, as they say, to compre- 
 hend his greatness." From tliis passion of So- 
 phia — elsewhere referred to Achamoth, another 
 name for Wisdom, and identical with Enthy- 
 mesis, or Desire — from this passion, then, of 
 Sophia, or Achamoth, without Will, springs the 
 world ; from her pain the pneumatic or spiritual
 
 30 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 elements, from her fear the psychic, from her ig- 
 norance (aporia) matter. Into the rest I will not 
 go. It is like looking into the abyss out of which 
 these ^ons were supposed to have emanated. 
 But in that gulf one can see, like dim, shadowy 
 portents, some of the ideas that were germinat- 
 ing amidst the decay of the old world. In the 
 identification of the intellect with desire and its 
 divorce from the will, in this vague yearning of 
 the intellect for the infinite fulness of the Father, 
 and the birth of the world from emotion (pathos), 
 J. seem to see into the real heart of what after 
 many centuries was to be called romanticism — 
 the infinitely craving personality, the usurpation 
 of emotion over reason, the idealization of love, 
 the confusion of the sensuous and the spiritual, 
 the perilous fascination that may go with these 
 confusions. It is like a dream of fever, beautiful 
 and malign by turns; and, looking at its wild 
 sources, one can understand why Goethe curtly 
 called romanticism disease and classicism health. 
 He might have added that disease is infectious, 
 whereas health must be acquired or preserved by 
 the effort of the individual. 
 
 Romanticism was thus early introduced into 
 Christianity, and with Christianity descended to 
 our own days. But there was another aspect 
 of Christian faith which maintained uncorrupted 
 the true idea of the infinite and, so long as it en- 
 dured, was able to save the world from falling
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 31 
 
 completel y into the sway of Alexandrianism. At 
 times, also, the original impulse of romanticism 
 may seem to have been almost lost, when some 
 revival of classical or pseudo-classical standards 
 swept over Europe. Romanticism, indeed, as we 
 know it to-day in its full force, arose only after 
 the purer Christian faith and the authority of the 
 classics had given way together to the tide of na- 
 turalism which set in strongly with the eighteenth 
 century. The exact cause and character of this 
 naturalistic movement can better be explained 
 when we come to deal with the relation of science 
 to romanticism as exemplified in the philosophy 
 of Huxley. Meanwhile it is sufificient to say that 
 historic romanticism, more strictly conceived, 
 began with Blake and Rousseau and was devel- 
 oped into a system by the Schlegels — remem- 
 bering always that the spirit at work in these 
 men is essentially akin to that spirit which ap- 
 pears so remote and exotic in ancient Alexandria. 
 Germany and Egypt have taken us a far jour- 
 ney from Fonthill and Bath, but in fact it is only 
 by some such historical survey as this that we 
 can comprehend the meaning of the romantic 
 egotism which supplies the theme of the one book 
 of Beckford's — for his volumes of travel are 
 now quite forgotten — that has significance to- 
 day. Something has already been said about the 
 relation of the celebration at Fonthill on his 
 coming of age with the production of Vathek.
 
 32 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 The old tradition of Beckford's literary perform- 
 ance is well known — how, as he told Redding 
 in 1835, he had written the story at one sitting, 
 that lasted for three days and two nights, dur- 
 ing which time he never took off his clothes. 
 Unfortunately Beckford's correspondence with 
 the Rev. Samuel Henley, which has since come 
 to light, quite shatters that heroic legend. He 
 was, as a matter of fact, at work on the manu- 
 script at least for a number of months, and was 
 tinkering at it at intervals for about five years. 
 Mr. Melville undertakes to reconcile Beckford's 
 statement with the facts by supposing he had in 
 mind, when he was talking with Redding, not the 
 whole book of Vathek as we have it, but merely one 
 of the episodes designed for it but never printed. 
 He wrote the story in French, and to his friend 
 Henley, a scholar of considerable Oriental attain- 
 ments, was entrusted the task of furnishing notes 
 and of making an English translation. Probably 
 out of impatience over Beckford's dilatoriness, 
 Henley put out an edition of his version in 1786, 
 with a prefatory note stating that it was trans- 
 lated from the Arabic. Beckford was naturally 
 incensed at this treachery, and immediately, in 
 1787, published the original French with a reply 
 to Henley's misrepresentation. We have thus the 
 curious fact that one of the classics of our litera- 
 ture was composed in a foreign tongue, but the 
 correspondence between Henley and Beckford
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 33 
 
 shows that the latter passed judgement on the 
 English and virtually stamped it as his own. 
 
 I suspect that Vathek is little read to-day, and 
 indeed a good deal of its extravagant fancy and 
 grotesque humour rings rather flat after the lapse 
 of years. But the book was popular in its time, 
 and is still one of the main documents to any one 
 who wishes to study the sources of the romantic 
 movement. I ts theme is the insatiable craving for 
 experience and the self-torturing egotism, which 
 were beginning to run like wild-fire through the 
 literature of Europe, and which reached their 
 consummation in Faust. Instead of the medie- 
 val setting of Goethe's poem, Beckford's hero is 
 an Eastern prince at whose feet lie all the pleas- 
 ures and powers of the world. Not satisfied with 
 the magnificence of his predecessors, he adds to 
 his palace five wings in which, like a Des Essein- 
 tes of the Orient, he can indulge separately in 
 the quintessential luxury of the five senses. His 
 thirst for knowledge is equal to his appetite for 
 pleasure, "for he wished to know everything, 
 even sciences that did not exist." His power was 
 greater than his knowledge; "when he was an- 
 gry one of his eyes became so terrible, that no per- 
 son could bear to behold it, and the wretch upon 
 whom it was fixed instantly fell backward, and 
 sometimes expired." Only on ^ thing- th^ Caliph 
 cannot command in his earthly, paradise — con-„ 
 tent; the stars al ^ 9Yfi his he ad, as he stands on his
 
 J 
 
 34 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 I tower looking down contemptuously on man- 
 I kind, are an irritation to his desires and a hu- 
 I miliation to his pride. Then enters the tempter, 
 in the form of a hideous Giaour, who in return 
 for a monstrous crime offers him the possession 
 of the palace of subterranean fire where reposes 
 Soliman Ben Daoud, surrounded by the talis- 
 mans that control the world. For a space the 
 story is lost in grotesque adventures; but at the 
 end, as Vathek and the Princess Nouronihar ap- 
 proach their goal, the imagination of the author 
 kindles and the sense of foreboding deepens and 
 intensifies step by step, until in the great Hall of 
 Eblis (for to this the promises of the Giaour have 
 brought them), at the sight of the vast unrest- 
 ing multitude who roam ceaselessly hither and 
 thither in furious agony or in rapt absorption, 
 heedless of everything about them and forever 
 avoiding one another, each with his right hand 
 pressed upon his heart — the feeling rises to real 
 terror and sublimity. At last the trembling pair 
 are led by the Giaour to the great Soliman, seated 
 aloft on a throne, yet, like the others, holding his 
 hand pressed upon his heart, and listening in- 
 tently to the sullen roar of a vast cataract, which 
 is the only sound that intrudes on the univer- 
 sal silence. He tells them of his doom, and con- 
 cludes : 
 
 "In consideration of the piety of my early youth, my 
 woes shall come to an end when this cataract shall for
 
 WILLIAM BECKFORD 35 
 
 ever cease to flow; till then I am in torments, ineffable 
 torments! an unrelenting fire preys on my heart." 
 
 Having uttered this exclamation Soliman raised his 
 hands towards Heaven, in token of supplication, and 
 the Caliph discerned through his bosom, which was 
 transparent as crystal, his heart enveloped in flames. 
 At a sight so full of horror Nouronihar fell back, like one 
 petrified, into the arms of Vathek, who cried out with a 
 convulsive sob: 
 
 "O Giaour! whither hast thou brought us? Allow us 
 to depart, and I will relinquish all thou hast promised. 
 O Mahomet! remains there no more mercy?" 
 
 "None! none!" replied the malicious Dive. "Know, 
 miserable prince! thou art now in the abode of ven- 
 geance and despair; thy heart also will be kindled, like 
 those of the other votaries of Eblis. A few days are al- 
 lotted thee previous to this fatal period; employ them 
 as thou wilt; recline on these heaps of gold; command 
 the Infernal Potentates; range at thy pleasure through 
 these immense subterranean domains; no barrier shall 
 be shut against thee; as for me, I have fulfilled my mis- 
 sion; I now^ leave thee to thyself." At these words he 
 vanished. 
 
 The device of the burning heart Beckford bor- 
 rowed from a French writer now forgotten, but 
 he has more than made it his own. Goethe, at 
 the conclusion of his Faust, could think of no bet- 
 ter redemption for his hero than to present him 
 in the altruistic act of reclaiming some waste 
 land. In thus attempting to cancel egotism with 
 sympathy, Goethe showed that, despite the ef- 
 forts of a lifetime to free himself from the thrall of 
 romanticism, he still at heart remained in bond-
 
 36 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 age to the old error. It would be folly to com- 
 pare Vathek with Faust as a work either of art or 
 of wisdom ; the genius of Beckford was fitful and 
 seldom under control; he was no philosopher or 
 seer; but it was given him once to symbolize a 
 great and everlasting truth better than Goethe 
 or any other man of his age. Romanticism is a 
 highly complex movement, and has contributed 
 largely to the world's sum of beauty and sublim- 
 ity. It has been defined as the sense of strange- 
 ness and wonder in things, and such a definition 
 tells at least half the story. But strangeness and 
 wonder may be qualities of all great literature : in 
 so far as they are peculiar to romanticism and 
 distinguish it from the universal mode which we 
 call classic, they will be found to proceed from, 
 or verge towards, that\morbid egotism which is 
 born of the union of an intensely felt personality 
 _with the notion of infinity as an escape from lim- 
 Jtationi If we look below the surface of things, 
 ahd penetrate through many illusions, we shall 
 perceive in Beckford's vision of the restless 
 throng, moving ever with hand pressed upon 
 flaming heart, the essential type and image of 
 the romantic life and literature.
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 
 Almost inevitably thej"omantic revival of re- 
 ligion in England took its rise at Oxford. From 
 a remote age that university had stood forth 
 again and again in a protest of the heart and the 
 imagination against the rationalizing and utilitar- 
 ian tendencies of the British character. As far 
 back as the early years of the fourteenth century 
 Richard Rolle of Hampole, who has been called 
 "the true father of English Hterature," as a stu- 
 dent at Oxford started a revolt against the pre- 
 vailing scholasticism of Duns Scotus; and his re- 
 form is not without curious analogies with the 
 movement that was to emanate from Oxford 
 five centuries later. In place of the nominalism 
 of Duns Scotus, which contains the germs of the 
 Protestant appeal to the reason of the individual, 
 Richard proclaimed the mystical principle of 
 love — universalitas mundialis creaturcB diligere 
 diligique cupit — and his writings in English and 
 Latin are one long exhortation to the love of God 
 and to the contemplative life which finds its 
 mystical consummation in that divine emotion. 
 
 He was the father of a long line of writers and 
 preachers who handed down the tradition of the 
 contemplative life from his own day to New- 
 man's, even to ours — a slender band of other-
 
 40 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 worldly men who from time to time seem merged 
 and forgotten in the great, ruthless, practical 
 population of England, and of whom our histo- 
 ries of literature speak far too little. In this he 
 was a normal representative of one important and 
 wholesome aspect of human nature; but there 
 was another side to him also, that which may 
 be called the romantic twist to the emotions 
 and is by no means a necessary concomitant of 
 / contemplation. In his glorification of the emp- 
 / tions and of the contemplative love of God there 
 j w;as always a lurking element of self -exaltation, 
 and his praises of the secluded life were filled 
 with outbursts of indignation against a society 
 which was only too willing to take him at his 
 word and leave him to his seclusion. He is an 
 early type of the soul that magnifies love and sym- 
 pathy and at the same time clamours against its 
 isolation in the midst of mankind. He is con- 
 sumed with ennui and the feeling of futility; he 
 cries out to heaven to remove him from a com- 
 munity of fools and worldlings among whom he 
 languished in unregarded uselessness. Like an- 
 other Carlyle he is afiflicted by the very noises of 
 society — penales sunt mihi vociferantes et crucior 
 quasi per incommodum guando clamor clangentium 
 me tangit. 
 
 This long tradition, in its aspects both of 
 strength and of weakness, must not be forgotten 
 when we consider the ground out of which sprang
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 41 
 
 the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century; 
 that movement was a part of the great romantic 
 flood that swept over Europe, and owed more to 
 Germany than the men of Oxford were aware of, 
 but it was still primarily English. The immedi- 
 ate impulse came as a reaction against the all- 
 invading Liberal and Erastian notions of the day, 
 and as an attempt to find a substitute within the 
 Church of England for the fervour of Wesleyan- 
 ism, and for the Evangelicalism which threatened 
 to convert the Church into a weak imitation of 
 Wesley's congregation. The little group of Fel- 
 lows of Oriel College saw that the enthusiasm of 
 this Evangelical revival had no tenacious anchor 
 in that form of the religious imagination, that 
 still-brooding celestial love, which is almost in- 
 separable from a humble reverence for tradition; 
 that it was a kind of emotional effervescence from 
 a utilitarian rationalism and must in the end 
 serve only to strengthen the sway of irreligion. 
 " * Unstable as water, it cannot excel, ' " Newman 
 was to write of this kind of Protestantism. " It 
 is but the inchoate state or stage of a doctrine, 
 and its final resolution is in Rationalism. This it 
 has ever shown when suffered to work itself out 
 without interruption." Newman himself reck- 
 oned the active beginning of the propaganda as 
 coincident with Keble's sermon of July 14, 1833, 
 against the liberalizing attacks on the Church, 
 and the first of the Tracts that were to create
 
 42 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 such a furor was dated September 9 of the same 
 year, Kcble himself, a Fellow of Oriel, though 
 he may be said to have fired the first gun in the 
 warfare, was not one of the militant saints, and 
 the brunt of the battle he soon let fall on other 
 shoulders. 
 
 Keble found his peace in the quiet ministra- 
 tions of his parish at Hursley. As did Newman, 
 he looked upon his pupil at Oriel, Richard Hur- 
 rell Froude, brother of the historian, as the real 
 leader of the movement — or rather instigator, 
 for Froude was early carried out of active life 
 by ill-health and died of consumption in 1836, 
 when still a young man. In the first shock of 
 his loss, it was the brilliance of his intellect that 
 seemed to stand out as his preeminent trait, "I 
 never, on the whole, fell in with so gifted a per- 
 son," Newman wrote in a letter the day after 
 hearing of his friend's death, "In variety and 
 perfection of gifts I think he far exceeded even 
 Keble. For myself, I cannot describe what I owe 
 to him as regards the intellectual principles of 
 religion and morals." Brilliant he no doubt was, 
 yet, as one reads the many testimonies of his 
 character gathered together in Miss Guiney's bio- 
 graphy, it is not so much his intellect as his au- 
 dacity that impresses one. He would have been 
 the Rupert of the war had he lived, dashing into 
 the ranks of the enemy without fear and without 
 too much circumspection. When others doubted.
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 43 
 
 he was sure ; and the most vivid picture we have 
 of him shows him pacing Trinity Gardens with his 
 hand on the shoulder of a friend, and saying 
 blithely, "Isaac, we must make a Row in the 
 world ! " Dean Church speaks of his "fiery impet- 
 uosity and the frank daring of his disrespectful 
 vocabulary" ; and James Mozley describes him as 
 hating "the present state of things so excessively 
 that any change would be a relief to him." His 
 own mother wrote of him in childhood that he 
 was "exceedingly impatient under vexatious cir- 
 cumstances; very much disposed to find his own 
 amusement in teasing and vexing others; and 
 almost entirely incorrigible when it was necessary 
 to reprove him." No, he was not the intellect of 
 the movement, and even Newman later admits 
 in the Apologia that " he had no turn for theology " 
 and that "his power of entering into the minds 
 of others was not equal to his other gifts." Had 
 he lived, he would not have added to the gravity 
 and lasting influence of the movement, I think; 
 but by his reckless indifference to the opinion 
 of the world he might have cut short the long 
 hesitation of Newman between the Church of 
 England and Rome. He would have brought 
 more acrimony into the debate, but would have 
 deprived it also of much of its profounder sig- 
 nificance. 
 
 There were other men, important in their day, 
 who fought by the side of Keble and Froude and
 
 44 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Newman, following them at various distances. 
 Pusey especially should not be overlooked, whose 
 high Tory connections brought a certain stand- 
 ing to the group of rebels among the Philistines 
 of the land. One surmises that his social posi- 
 tion, quite as much as his scholarship, caused 
 the name Puseyism to be attached to the move- 
 ment in its earlier phases. Pusey was a laborious 
 student and plunged deep into the German liter- 
 ' ature of the day in order to combat its infidel 
 tendencies — went so deep that he never quite 
 emerged to the surface. In the long run New- 
 man became the leader and representative of the 
 group, and to-day his commanding personality 
 and the long agony of his conversion alone retain 
 significance in the common memory, while the 
 other men are but names of history. Such is the 
 prerogative of genius that the whole Oxford 
 Movement seems to us now but the personal con- 
 cern of a single soul. 
 
 John Henry Newman was born in 1801. He 
 .was, as were also by a curious coincidence Man- 
 
 yning and Ward, the son of a London banker. In 
 childhood he read much in the Arabian Nights 
 and was filled with odd, solitary imaginings. At 
 the age of fifteen he underwent some kind of con- 
 version, the nature of which he has not made per- 
 fectly clear. It was, however, attended with a 
 dedication of himself to missionary or other re- 
 ligious work, and with the conviction that he
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 45 
 
 should remain a celibate through life. More im- 
 portant was the strengthening within him of the 
 feeling, never after that to leave him, which 
 would appear to be the guiding sense of all deeply 
 religious minds — ihe feeling that material phe- 
 nomena are unreal and that the only reaUties are 
 God and the human soul. "From a boy," he 
 writes in the midst of his later struggle, "I had 
 been led to consider that my Maker and I, 
 His creature, were the two beings, luminously 
 such, in rerum natural From boyhood, too, he 
 could not look upon the natural world without a 
 strange sense of baffled illusion. Of all his letters 
 that I have read, none, perhaps, lets us closer to 
 the secret of his heart than the one written to his 
 sister in the spring of 1828, after returning to Ox- 
 ford from a ride to Cuddesdon: 
 
 The country, too, is beautiful; the fresh leaves, the 
 scents, the varied landscape. Yet I never felt so in- 
 tensely the transitory nature of this world as when most 
 delighted with these country scenes. And in riding out 
 to-day I have been impressed more powerfully than be- 
 fore I had an idea was possible with the two lines: 
 
 "Chanting with a solemn voice 
 Minds us of our better choice." 
 
 I could hardly believe the lines were not my own, and 
 Keble had not taken them from me. I wish it were pos- 
 sible for words to put down those indefinite, vague, and 
 withal subtle feelings which quite pierce the soul and 
 make it sick. . . . What a veil and curtain this world of 
 sense is! beautiful, but still a veil.
 
 46 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 For one who can really understand the mean- 
 ing of that letter I suspect the dark places of 
 Newman's career will have little difficulty. He 
 in whom these words awaken no response had 
 better lay down his Newman and take up his 
 Darwin; he will find nothing to concern him in 
 the experience of a soul to whom, as Newman 
 wrote in another letter, "time is nothing except 
 as the seed of eternity." 
 
 In 1 817 he went up to Oxford, entering at 
 Trinity College. In 1822 he was elected a Fel- 
 low of Oriel, where religion was the one serious 
 topic of the Common Room. Two years later he 
 was ordained, and in 1828, becoming Vicar of 
 St. Mary's, he began those sermons whose re- 
 strained eloquence held so many of the young 
 men of Oxford spellbound. What with a less in- 
 trospective mind would have been an important 
 event was a tour of the Mediterranean taken 
 with Hurrell Froude and his father. As a matter 
 of fact one cannot see from his letters that the 
 view of so many great and memorable scenes 
 of history had much meaning for him. From 
 Rome he wrote that he had "alas, experienced 
 none of that largeness and expansion of mind " 
 which he had been told he "should get from trav- 
 elling." All his interest was in the journeying of 
 his own soul, which before this had started on the 
 long and obscure road that was to lead it to its 
 spiritual Rome. The actual Rome of the Pope
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 47 
 
 seems to have repelled and attracted him at the 
 same time. Much that he saw there appeared to 
 him "polytheistic, degrading, idolatrous"; but 
 the longing in him was nevertheless increased 
 for reunion with the ancient mother. "Oh, that 
 Rome were not Rome!" he exclaims; "but I 
 seem to see as clear as day that a union with her 
 
 Js impossible. She is the cruel Church asking of 
 us impossibilities, excommunicating us for dis- 
 obedience, and now watching and exulting over 
 our approaching overthrow." At bottom one 
 suspects that this spectacle of the visible centre 
 of Catholicism fixed more deeply in his heart the 
 desiderium RomcB, as Erasmus felt and called it, 
 the haunting memory, the "perfume of Rome," 
 which was really but another form of the common V 
 
 ^romantic homesickness for some place of ideal 
 peace and loveliness where the self-tortured soul 
 may find sympathy and healing for the coldness 
 of this world. 
 
 In literature the chief result of the journey was 
 the series of short poems, issued in 1834 in the 
 Lyra Apostolica. Those particularly which were 
 written after his almost fatal illness in Sicily are 
 filled with a deep emotional realization of the 
 other world, and belong with the best of Eng- 
 land's religious poetry. The stanzas beginning 
 "Lead, Kindly Light," composed on shipboard 
 while sailing from Sicily to Marseilles, express 
 with lyric poignancy the sense of an ever-pre-
 
 48 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 sent divine Providence, but they have become 
 too famiHar for quotation. Another poem, writ- 
 ten only a few days later at Marseilles, although 
 the last twelve lines were added after the death 
 of Froude, shows how close the world of spirits 
 seemed to Newman's heart, very close yet sep- 
 arated by the strangeness of this earthly veil : 
 
 Do not their souls, who 'neath the Altar wait 
 j Until their second birth, 
 j The gift of patience need, as separate 
 
 From their first friends of earth? 
 Not that earth's blessings are not all outshone 
 
 By Eden's Angel flame. 
 But that earth knows not yet, the Dead has won 
 
 That crown, which was his aim. 
 For when he left it, 't was a twilight scene 
 
 About his silent bier, 
 A breathless struggle, faith and sight between, 
 
 And Hope and sacred Fear. 
 Fear startled at his pains and dreary end, 
 
 Hope raised her chalice high. 
 And the twin-sisters still his shade attend, 
 
 View'd in the mourner's eye. 
 So day by day for him from earth ascends, 
 
 As steam in summer-even. 
 The speechless intercession of his friends, 
 
 Toward the azure heaven. 
 Ah! dearest, with a word he could dispel 
 
 All questioning, and raise 
 Our hearts to rapture, whispering all was well 
 
 And turning prayer to praise. 
 And other secrets too he could declare, 
 
 By patterns all divine, 
 His earthly creed retouching here and there, 
 
 And deepening every line. 
 Dearest! he longs to speak, as I to know. 
 
 And yet we both refrain:
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 49 
 
 It were not good: a little doubt below, 
 And all will soon be plain. 
 
 From these personal lines the mind reverts to one 
 of the greatest of Newman's Parochial Sermons, 
 that on The Invisible World, in which, from in- 
 ability to understand the lower world of animals 
 so real to our physical senses, the preacher argues 
 a like reality for the higher world known to our 
 spiritual senses: 
 
 And yet in spite of this universal world which we see, 
 there is another world, quite as far-spreading, quite as 
 close to us, and more wonderful; another world all 
 ajround us, though we see it not, and more wonderful 
 than the world we see, for this reason if for no other, that 
 we do not see it. All around us are numberless objects, 
 coming and going, watching, working, or waiting, which 
 we see not; this is that other world, which the eyes 
 reach not unto, but faith only. . . . 
 
 And in that other world are the souls also of the dead. 
 They too, when they depart hence, do not cease to exist, 
 but they retire from this visible scene of things; or, in ■ 
 other words, they cease to act towards us and before us " 
 through our senses. . . . They remain, but without the 
 iiisual means of approach towards us, and correspond- 1 
 ehce with us. 
 
 It may not be irrelevant to add that in the words 
 of the poem, And yet we both refrain : It were not 
 good, one may come close to the distinction be- 
 tween a vivid faith and the pseudo-science of psy- 
 chical research, faith resting in profound realiza- 
 tion of the different kinds of knowledge, pseudo- 
 science attempting to confuse them together.
 
 50 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Meanwhile the religious situation had become 
 more acute at Oxford, and on returning thither 
 Newman plunged into the thick of the contro- 
 versy. The famous series of Tracts for the Times 
 was begun. The most important of these, Num- 
 ber 90, was written by Newman, and touches 
 the core of the argument. Against the evangeliz- 
 ing and liberalizing tendency of religion at that 
 time, Newman here proclaimed that the Church 
 of England was essentially Catholic and had 
 never accepted the reformed dogmas of the six- 
 teenth century. He attempted to prove, not 
 without some sophistry one is forced to admit, 
 that the Thirty-nine Articles were really not in- 
 tended to favour the Reformation, but were a 
 loose compromise of contending views, and might 
 best be interpreted as a summary of the old faith 
 with only such verbal concessions to the radical 
 party as the times made necessary. This was in 
 1 841, and within a few months twelve thousand 
 five hundred copies of the Tract had been sold. 
 The storm that broke upon the Tractarians 
 showed what the common sense of England per- 
 ceived as the logical conclusion of their position. 
 It saw clearly that they were tending, not to- 
 wards a vague Anglican Catholicism as the Trac- 
 tarians fondly beheved of themselves, but to- 
 wards the Catholicism of Rome ; and to know all 
 that this meant to England one must take into 
 consideration the long history of the land, the
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 51 
 
 plotting and counterplotting that followed the 
 Reformation of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, the 
 horrors of the Gunpowder Plot as it was con- 
 ceived in the popular mind, the treacheries of 
 Charles II, and the death struggle with the Stu- 
 art party of the eighteenth century. And essen- 
 tially the common sense of England was right. 
 The life of Newman for the next four years was a 
 hidden tragedy in which the protagonists were 
 his loyalty to the national tradition and his logi- 
 cal integrity of mind; and in the end logic with 
 him won the day. In 1843 he resigned the Vicar- 
 age of St. Mary's, feeUng that he could no longer 
 with honesty preach in an Anglican pulpit. With 
 a band of sympathetic comrades he retired to Lit- 
 tlemore, a suburb of Oxford, where he had built 
 a Chapel of Ease on St. Mary's and converted 
 a row of cottages into a kind of Protestant mon- 
 astery. Here he set himself to the task of clari- 
 fying his own mind by analyzing the office of the 
 church in developing, under divine guidance, the 
 depositum fidei which was originally entrusted to 
 it in the Scriptures. In this attempt to reconcile 
 the changes of histo.ry with the everlasting im- 
 mutability of truth, he began with this one as- 
 sumption as certain: "Whatever history teaches, 
 whatever it omits, whatever it says and unsays, 
 at least the Christianity of history is not Protest- 
 antism. . . . To be deep in history is to cease to 
 be a Protestant." Meanwhile the drama of his
 
 52 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 soul was worked out so quietly and with so little 
 consultation with the world that the final step, 
 however it had been seen in theory, came as a 
 shock even to his friends. Wilfrid Ward, in his 
 Life of Cardinal Wiseman, gives a vivid picture 
 of Newman in these days: 
 
 Those who still survive describe him as standing up- 
 right at a high desk, writing for hours together — to- 
 wards the end for fourteen hours in the day — at his 
 book [the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine]. 
 The younger men looked in awe at their inscrutable 
 Rector, who never spoke (unless in private to Ambrose 
 St. John) of what was in his thoughts, and never gave 
 them an indication that he expected them to take the 
 great step. Day by day he seemed to grow paler, and 
 taller, and thinner — at last almost transparent — as 
 he stood in the light of the sun and worked at his task. 
 
 At this time Cardinal Wiseman, desiring to 
 know how Newman stood towards the Roman 
 Church, sent a convert, Mr. Bernard Smith, who 
 had been Newman's curate at Littlemore, to 
 sound him. There is a touch of humour in the 
 only indication that Newman gave of his posi- 
 tion. At dinner-time he appeared and stood for 
 a moment conspicuously in the middle of the 
 room. He wore grey trousers, and Mr. Smith, who 
 was acquainted with Newman's strict adherence 
 to the clerical costume, understood that he no 
 longer regarded himself as a priest of the Church. 
 Shortly after this, Newman invited the Passion- 
 ist Father Dominic, an Italian, to Littlemore,
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 53 
 
 and on the 8th of October, 1845, he received con- 
 ditional baptism. On the first day of the month 
 following he was formally confirmed at Oscott 
 by Cardinal Wiseman, and the great conversion 
 was accomplished. But first, to the unfinished 
 manuscript of his Essay on Development lying on 
 his desk at Littlemore he had added this para- 
 graph, of which it has been said that it "will be 
 remembered as long as the English language en- 
 dures": 
 
 Such were the thoughts concerning the "Blessed Vis- 
 ion of Peace," of one whose long-continued petition had 
 been that the Most Merciful would not despise the work 
 of His own Hands, nor leave him to himself; — while 
 yet his eyes were dim, and his breast laden, and he 
 could but employ Reason in the things of Faith. And 
 now, dear Reader, time is short, eternity is long. Put 
 not from you what you have here found ; regard it not 
 as mere matter of present controversy; set not out re- 
 solved to refute it, and looking about for the best way 
 of doing so; seduce not yourself with the imagination 
 that it comes of disappointment, or disgust, or restless- 
 ness, or wounded feeling, or undue sensibility, or other 
 weakness. Wrap not yourself round in the associations 
 of years past, nor determine that to be truth which you 
 wish to be so, nor make an idol of cherished anticipa- 
 tions. Time is short, eternity is long. 
 
 Nunc dimittis servum tuum Domine, 
 Secundum verbum tuum in pace 
 Quia viderunt oculi mei salutare TUUM. 
 
 I Newman's act of conversion was, undoubtedly, 
 |the most important religious event of England
 
 54 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 in the nineteenth century — so much, after all, 
 do the struggle and destiny of a great individual 
 soul outweigh in significance the unconscious or 
 undeliberate movements of masses of men. Nor 
 is the process by which he passed from Angli- 
 jcanism to Romanism hard to follow. We have 
 seen that from boyhood the one reality to him 
 was the existence of his own soul and of God, and 
 we have heard his confession of strange uneasi- 
 ness in the presence even of the beautiful things 
 of this world. In a passage of the Apologia of no- 
 ble eloquence he deduces his creed quite logically 
 from these feelings: 
 
 Starting then with the being of a God, ... I look out 
 of myself into the world of men, and there I see a sight 
 which fills me with unspeakable distress. . . . The sight 
 of the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll, 
 full of "lamentations, and mourning, and woe." 
 
 To consider the world in its length and breadth, its 
 various history, the many races of man, their starts, 
 their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; 
 and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of wor- 
 ship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their ran- 
 dom achievements and acquirements, the impotent con- 
 clusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and 
 broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution 
 of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the pro- 
 gress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not to- 
 wards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, 
 his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain 
 hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the 
 defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental 
 anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervad-
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 55 
 
 ing idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless ir- 
 religion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully 
 yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, "having 
 no hope and without God in the world," — all this is a 
 vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind 
 the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely 
 beyond human solution. 
 
 . . . And so I argue about the world; — if there be a 
 God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated 
 in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint | ^tVic 
 with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact : 
 as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine 
 of what is theologically called original sin becomes to 
 me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as 
 the existence of God. 
 
 In these paragraphs, which I have weakened 
 somewhat by condensing, we have expressed, 
 then, the basis of Newman's faith — the two 
 realities of God and of man's fall from God, with 
 the consequent state of the world's misery and 
 blind ignorance. From these two supreme real- 
 ities, as they seem to him, he argues that it would 
 i^e perfectly natural to expect, that indeed we 
 must expect, some clear instrument of revela- 
 tion, or provision of the Creator, "for retaining in 
 tlie world a knowledge of Himself, so definite and 
 destined as to be a proof against the energy of 
 human scepticism." This was Newman's creed 
 wHfen he went up to Oxford, it was his creed when 
 he retired to Littlemore, and it was his creed 
 when he wore the cardinal. The only difference 
 lay in his conception of the manner in which this
 
 .1 
 
 56 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 divine provision, or instrument of revelation, 
 manifested itself to mankind. And his change in 
 this respect may be expressed in a series of ex- 
 clusions. To Newman it seemed that the minds 
 of men were sharply divided, in accordance with 
 ^their ways of regarding revelation, into the 
 Roman Catholic, the Anglican, the Protestant, 
 and the rationalistic. The last-named condition, 
 rationalism, as it left no place for an absolute 
 revelation, was immediately excluded by him; 
 it was abhorrent to everything his nature craved. 
 There remained the three forms of Christianity. 
 But of these. Protestantism was also excluded, 
 because he saw at once, and rightly, I think, that 
 its certain goal was rationalism. Protestantism, 
 ^s he properly used the word, differs from the 
 Anglican and Roman creeds in looking to the 
 Bible alone for its source of revelation, and in 
 making the individual mind the judge of what 
 the Bible teaches instead of subordinating the 
 judgement of the individual to the authority of 
 i^the Fathers and of the Church. Now it is clear, 
 if the reason of the individual is to determine the 
 meaning of revelation, that reason is the ulti- 
 mate authority, and the step to rationalism is 
 easy and inevitable. This was seen perfectly well 
 by the controversialists of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury, and the great bulwark of Protestantism, 
 Chillingworth's The Religion of Protestants a 
 Safe Way to Salvation, or, as one of the books of
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 57 
 
 that work is entitled, Scripture the only Rule 
 whereby to judge of Controversies, was a long and, 
 it must be said, fundamentally unsuccessful at- 
 tempt to rebut just such charges made against 
 Protestantism by a certain Jesuit, Matthias Wil- 
 son, who wrote under the name of Edward Knott. 
 History was on the side of the Jesuit, for it can 
 be demonstrated that the deistic rationalism of 
 the eighteentji century was a direct outcome of 
 the Protestant rationalism of such writers as 
 Chillingworth; and again in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury Newman perceived that this same close 
 kinship existed between the Protestant, or Evan- 
 gelical, wing of the Church and the rationalistic 
 and scientific tendencies of his own day. 
 
 Protestantism of the Bible was therefore ex- 
 cluded by Newman for a Church which claimed a 
 direct authority outside of and supplementary to, 
 though never subversive of, the Bible. His prin- 
 cipal work, before his final conversion, was The 
 Via Media, an endeavour to maintain the supre- 
 macy of the Anglican creed as a middle and safe 
 way between Protestantism and Roman Cathol- 
 icism. His argument, in brief, is this. He agrees 
 V{ith Rome in demanding some instrument of 
 revelation outside of the individual's understand^ 
 ing of the Bible, some authority which can an- 
 swer directly and unmistakably the many ques- 
 ^tions which the Bible leaves obscure, and he 
 agrees with Rome in holding that the only au-
 
 58 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 thorlty which has the divine commission to an- 
 swer such questions is the Church. But he dif- 
 fers from Rome in defining the Church. The 
 voice of the Church with him is in the writings of 
 the Fathers and the decisions of the Councils up 
 to a certain point of time. That is to say, up to 
 and including the Council of Nicaea the Church, 
 he thought, was united and authoritative in its 
 interpretation and expansion of the faith, or 
 depositum fidei, which was originally entrusted 
 to it. After that date the Councils ceased to 
 represent the whole Christian community and 
 were subject to errors of passion and judgement. 
 Newman at this time made much of the famous 
 saying of St. Vincent of Lerins, Quod semper, 
 quod ubique, qtwd ah omnibus (What has been 
 believed always, everywhere, and by all) ; as a 
 matter of fact he accepted the ubique and the ab 
 omnibus, but rejected the semper. The true re- 
 formation adopted by Anglicanism was, in his 
 view, merely a return to the ancient and uni- 
 versal faith of the Church by eliminating the 
 false accretions which had been added since the 
 Council of Nicaea and which constituted the 
 corruptions of the Roman branch of the Church ; 
 Anglicanism was truly catholic : Romanism was 
 sectarian. 
 
 But Newman's logical mind soon found this 
 position as difficult to hold as that of Bible Pro- 
 testantism which he had so summarily rejected.
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 59 
 
 For, after all, what is the essential difference be- 
 tween clinging to one particular book as the sole 
 depository of faith and accepting the books of a 
 determined period ? The Fathers and Councils 
 must be interpreted, and selection must be made 
 among their various sayings, by the individual 
 reason just as in the case of the Bible. The dis- 
 tinction is one of magnitude only, not of kind. 
 Against this need of interpreting the Bible or a 
 closed set of books, Rome upheld the institu- 
 tion of the Church, as a living voice having di- 
 v^ine authority to answer the questions of men as 
 tjhey arise and to develop the faith in accordance 
 with the growth of human knowledge. Grant 
 Newman's unshakable demand for a distinct 
 verbal revelation, grant his demand for a rigidly 
 logical and external authority, and the path 
 would seem to be step by step to Rome. 
 
 Yet I confess I have never been able to follow 
 him in his course without a feeling of uneasi- 
 ness, and that feeling has been deepened into 
 something like distress by reading the authori- 
 tative record of his life.^ The very plan of Mr. 
 Ward's work is of a sort to raise disquieting 
 questions. It gives only a single chapter to the 
 events of Newman's life down to and including 
 his conversion, and devotes the remainder of 
 two bulky volumes to his experiences in the 
 
 * The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman : Based on His Private 
 Journals and Correspondence. By Wilfrid Ward. 2 vols. New York : 
 Longmans, Green & Co. 1912.
 
 6o THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Roman Church. For this outrageous dispropor- 
 tion Mr. Ward is not altogether responsible. 
 The story of the early years and conversion has 
 already been related by Newman himself in the 
 Apologia, and this has been supplemented by 
 the two volumes of his letters edited by Miss 
 Mozley. It was Newman's own desire that no- 
 thing should be added to those records by his 
 present official biographer. Mr. Ward's work, 
 therefore, should properly be read, not as a 
 complete and independent memoir, but as 
 a continuation of Miss Mozley's record. I am 
 bound to say, however, that, even with this res- 
 ervation, the present volumes err somewhat in 
 proportion. Newman was seldom at his best as 
 a letter-writer, and a good deal of the corre- 
 spondence now printed is neither necessary to 
 an understanding of Newman's character nor 
 entertaining in itself. For the rest, Mr. Ward's 
 difficult task has been admirably and coura- 
 geously carried through. When he himself takes 
 the pen in hand his narrative and characteriza- 
 tion are clear, succinct, and interesting. 
 
 But with all Mr. Ward's tact and despite his 
 good faith as a Catholic, one cannot close these 
 two volumes without feeling that Newman's sur- 
 render to the appeal of Rome was a pathetic mis- 
 take. It was as if the convert, by altering his 
 direction, had suddenly brought himself face 
 to face with a stone wall. To every plan he
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 6i 
 
 broached for new activity came the benumbing 
 reply, Non possumus. He was hemmed in, barked 
 at by opposition on every side, beaten down by 
 exasperating distrust and envy. Mr. Ward tells 
 with valiant honesty all the plans of the con- 
 vert that were balked in one way or another. 
 The difficulties that beset him as editor, as 
 rector of the Irish Catholic University, and as 
 promoter of a propaganda in Oxford to influ- 
 ence the intellectual life of England, are typical 
 of his career. In the end, when his active years 
 were past and he could no longer disturb those 
 in authority, he received due recognition in the 
 Cardinalate, and his closing days were, we like 
 to believe, crowned with a great peace. It is 
 true also that more than once in his bitter years, 
 with a tone of conviction it would be dishonour- 
 ble to doubt, he repudiated the suggestion of 
 regret over his move. In his saddest moment 
 he could write — ex animo, as he said — "that 
 Protestantism is the dreariest of possible re- 
 ligions." He could distinguish clearly between 
 the Church and its rulers: 
 
 To-day is the 20th anniversary of my setting up the 
 Oratory in England, and every year I have more to 
 thank God for, and more cause to rejoice that He 
 helped me over so great a crisis. — Since A.B. obliges me 
 to say it, this I cannot omit to say: — I have found in 
 the Catholic Church abundance of courtesy, but very 
 little sympathy, among persons in high place, except a 
 few — but there is a depth and a power in the Catholic
 
 62 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 religion, a fulness of satisfaction in its creed, its theology, 
 its rites, its sacraments, its discipline, a freedom yet a 
 support also, before which the neglect or the misappre- 
 hension about oneself on the part of individual living 
 persons, however exalted, is as so much dust, when 
 weighed in the balance. This is the true secret of the 
 Church's strength, the principle of its indefectibility, 
 and the bond of its indissoluble unity. It is the earnest 
 and the beginning of the repose of heaven. 
 
 Yet it is true nevertheless that he resented 
 keenly and sometimes denounced sharply not 
 only the thwarting of his personal ambitions, but 
 also the limitations imposed upon his intellectual 
 a.ncji spiritual mission. He who felt himself born 
 to be a leader of his people found himself sud- 
 denly thrust into ignoble obscurity. To his be- 
 loved Ambrose St. John he wrote, in 1857: "To 
 the rising generation, to the sons of those who 
 knew me, or read what I wrote fifteen or twenty 
 years ago, I am a mere page of history. ... It 
 was at Oxford, and by my Parochial sermons, 
 that I had influence — all that is past." And 
 three years later, in the intimacy of his diary, 
 vhe could exclaim: "O my God, I seem to have 
 wasted these years that I have been a Catholic. 
 What I wrote as a Protestant has had far greater 
 power, force, meaning, success than my Catholic 
 works, and this troubles me a great deal." It is 
 jnot strange that his inner vision was at times per- 
 iturbed, his faith almost touched. "As years go 
 ion," he records in his diary, "I have less sensi-
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 63 
 
 ble devotion and inward life." He even notes a 
 change in his physical expression: "Till the af- 
 fair of No. ninety and my going to Littlemore, 
 I had my mouth half open, and commonly a 
 smile on my face — and from that time onwards 
 my mouth has been closed and contracted, and 
 the muscles are so set now, that I cannot but look 
 grave and forbidding." Inevitably, as this feel- 
 ing of failure and loneliness deepened, he con- 
 trasted the poverty of the present with the actual 
 power and richer promise of his Oxford career. 
 There is a pathetic letter written in 1863 to 
 Keble, who had started on the path with him, 
 or even before him, but had drawn back at the 
 edge of the precipice — a letter whose closing 
 words are, as it were, the revelation of a great 
 and hidden tragedy: 
 
 I have said all this, knowing it will interest you. 
 Never have I doubted for one moment your affection 
 for me, never have I been hurt at your silence. I inter- 
 preted it easily — it was not the silence of others. It 
 was not the silence of men, nor the forgetfulness of men, 
 who can recollect about me and talk about me enough, 
 when there is something to be said to my disparagement. 
 You are always with me a thought of reverence and lo\'e, 
 and there is nothing I love better than you, and Isaac, 
 and Copeland, and many others I could name, except 
 Him Whom I ought to love best of all and suj^remely. 
 May He Himself, Who is the over-abundant compen- 
 sation for all losses, give me His own Presence, and then 
 I shall want nothing and desiderate nothing, but none 
 ^ul He can make up for the loss of those old familiar 
 faces which haunt me continually.
 
 64 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 It would be easy to exaggerate, possibly the 
 tone of Mr. Ward's narrative tempts one to ex- 
 aggerate, the sadder aspect of Newman's life in 
 the Catholic Church. It must not be forgotten 
 that his Apologia, which contains some of the 
 most beautiful rehgious writing of the age, his 
 Idea of a University, and other works which will 
 not be forgotten, were written after his conver- 
 sion. Yet withal it is hard to avoid the con- 
 clusion that in a purely literary way something 
 was lost to him when he severed himself from 
 the tradition in which his imagination and feel- 
 ings were so deeply rooted. The mere physical 
 change from the glories and haunting memories 
 of the colleges of Oxford to the crudeness of 
 the Oratory at Edgbaston took away one of the 
 props of his imagination. The knowledge that 
 he no longer belonged to the faith of the great 
 body of his countrymen, but was regarded by 
 them, whether rightly or wrongly, as one of a 
 sect, deprived him of that support of sympathy 
 which was necessary to the full unfolding of his 
 genius. And the loss was not Newman's alone, 
 but ours and all men's. At the close of the 
 chapter which includes the conversion Mr. Ward 
 quotes the beautiful words of Principal Shairp on 
 the effect of what seemed to Anglicans an act of 
 apostasy : 
 
 How vividly comes back the remembrance of the 
 aching blank, the awful pause, which fell on Oxford
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 65 
 
 when that voice had ceased, and we knew that we 
 should hear it no more. It was as when, to one kneeling 
 by night, in the silence of some vast cathedral, the great 
 bell tolling solemnly overhead has suddenly gone still. 
 To many, no doubt, the pause was not of long continu- 
 ance. Soon they began to look this way and that for 
 new teachers, and to rush vehemently to the opposite 
 extremes of thought. But there were those who could 
 not so lightly forget. All the more these withdrew into 
 themselves. On Sunday forenoons and evenings, in the 
 retirement of their rooms, the printed words of those 
 marvellous sermons would thrill them till they wept 
 " abundant and most sweet tears." Since then many 
 voices of powerful teachers they may have heard, but 
 none that ever penetrated the soul like his. 
 
 With no desire to intrude into the debate be- 
 tween Anglican and Roman, with interest cen- 
 tred rather upon the purely human aspect of the 
 act, one may well feel, even to-day, something 
 of that deep chagrin which Principal Shairp and 
 Matthew Arnold and other contemporaries ex- 
 pressed. Not for Oxford controversialists alone, 
 but for all who draw their spiritual sustenance 
 from English literature, that event was, if not 
 the silencing, at least the muffling, of a magic 
 voice. 
 
 Newman, as we have seen, was led to take 
 the fatal step by strictly logical deductions. 
 Grant his premisses, that the human mind is con- 
 fined to a choice within the circle of religious 
 authority and rationalism, and it is easy to 
 follow him on his path to Rome. But the
 
 66 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 question remains whether this circle is indeed 
 the boundary of man's intellectual and spiritual 
 jpower. Certainly beyond the reach of rational- 
 ism, or science, to use its modern equivalent, 
 there lies the purely sceptical habit; and there 
 are those who will maintain that in the other 
 direction, beyond the utmost bounds of dogma 
 and revelation, they have discerned, more or less 
 clearly, a realm of pure religious intuition which 
 is reserved for the mystical eye. Now if we try 
 to determine in what way Newman's inner circle 
 of revelation and science is separated from the 
 outer circle of mysticism and scepticism which 
 he barely touched, we shall find no better mark 
 of distinction than in the attitude of the mind, 
 in one and the other circle, towards the unrelated 
 details of experience. Using this criterion, we 
 shall see that in the circle of revelation and 
 science (philosophical science, that is, as the 
 modern form of rationalism) the mind relaxes its 
 grip to a certain extent on the insistent reality 
 of details or individual moments of experience in 
 order to preserve its belief in the universality of 
 some supposed personal force or of some natural 
 law; whereas in the circle of the mystic and the 
 sceptic the mind never relaxes its grip on the 
 individual detail for such a personal or material 
 law._ It may sound somewhat paradoxical to 
 bring revelation and science together in such 
 a bond, and indeed in one sense there is a real
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 67 
 
 difference between the two, in so far as religion 
 has to do with a spiritual experience while 
 science is concerned with physical or material 
 experience; but in their ma,nner of dealing with 
 these two kinds of experience they are in ac- 
 cord. The man to whom religion means revel- 
 ation only, holds resolutely to the reality of a 
 personal God, at once Creator and Providence, 
 who reveals himself by the voice of authority, 
 whether written or spoken. It makes no differ- 
 ence to him that creeds have changed from age 
 to age, or that a thousand creeds exist side by 
 side, or that this or that moment of his experi- 
 ence seems to contradict such a belief: his be- 
 lief abides. And so with the man of science. He 
 holds resolutely to the reality of some infallible 
 natural cause controlling the world, which re- 
 veals itself by tradition and experiment. It 
 makes no difference to him that the formulation 
 of this cause has changed from age to age, or that 
 a host of contradictory formulae exist side by side, 
 or that individual experiments are constantly 
 forcing him to question his scientific belief: his 
 belief abides. Such a definition of the scientific 
 method may seem contrary to what is commonly 
 held, for we are apt to think of science as the 
 habit of mind which searches for and clings to 
 the actual individual fact independently of pre- 
 supposition or theory and regardlessly of con- 
 sequence ; and science in its positive form may be
 
 68 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 of that character. But the rationalistic science 
 of which I speak, the science which really counts 
 and which colours to-day our popular philoso- 
 phies, is of quite another sort. Take as an illus- 
 tration the present state of evolutionary biology: 
 what is the actual practice of the leading biolo- 
 gists? They all, or nearly all, start with the pre- 
 supposition that the whole animate world is de- 
 veloping under some evolutionary cause which 
 has been, or can be, discovered and formulated. 
 'To one biologist this cause is the survival of the 
 fit, to another it is Lamarckianism, or othogenesis, 
 or mutation, or kinetogenesis, or metakinesis, 
 or orthoplasy, or — who shall say what? I quote 
 a strange language ignorantly. The theories dif- 
 fer, are indeed often diametrically opposed, but 
 the method of theorizing is always the same. 
 Having observed a certain number of phenomena 
 the biologist proceeds to formulate from them 
 his notion of the evolutionary cause. But to do 
 ^ this he inevitably neglects, it may be by an un- 
 v^ conscious absorption or it may be by half dis- 
 '^ honest closing of the eyes, all the phenomena 
 that will not fit into his formula. Then comes 
 a brother theorist who takes part of these ne- 
 glected phenomena and builds up a different for- 
 mula. The point is that this rationalistic form 
 of science depends on an invincible belief in some 
 universal law of nature, and on a tendency to 
 overlook if necessary the individual phenom-
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 69 
 
 enon in favour of this law. The various theories 
 "keep and pass and turn again," but the faith 
 in theory, like the Brahma of the poem, abides 
 unshaken : 
 
 I am the doubter and the doubt. 
 
 I cannot see that the method differs one whit 
 from that of the dogmatist in religion: the one, 
 maintaining his faith in an unvarying cause, and 
 untroubled by refractory details, formulates his 
 experience with material phenomena into a scien- 
 tific hypothesis; the other, holding fast to his 
 faith in God's revelation of himself to the human 
 soul, expands his inner experience into a myth- 
 ology, unconcerned by individual facts that can- 
 not be reconciled to his creed. And just as these 
 two methods agree together, so they differ in the 
 same way from the habit of mind of the sceptic 
 and mystic. As a confirmation of this agreement 
 and difference you will find that the dogmatist, 
 whose religion is confined to revelation, and the 
 rationalistic man of science may in the long run 
 coime together, are actually coming together to- 
 day. It is a notable fact that Newman's doc- 
 trine of development is taken by the modernists 
 as a substantial bond between revelation and 
 .evolution. Both dogmatist and scientist avert 
 their faces from the outer ring of the mystic 
 and the sceptic. On the other hand, it was per- 
 fectly easy for a sceptic like Sainte-Beuve to en-
 
 70 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 ter into the mind of a mystic such as Pascal, 
 while Pascal himself avowed explicitly his su- 
 preme scepticism. 
 
 The genuine sceptic is very rare, but his char- 
 acteristics may be known by comparing such a 
 mind as Sainte-Beuve's with Taine's. Both men 
 wrote much on literature, but they approached 
 the subject in utterly different ways. Taine be- 
 lieved that an absolute law could be found 
 for determining why a particular sort of writing 
 should appear at any time. Given a complete 
 knowledge of an author's race, environment, and 
 epoch, his works could be analyzed as accurately 
 as a chemist analyzes the ingredients of sugar or 
 vitriol. This is the famous formula on which he 
 based his History of English Literature ; it is, as 
 you see, the extreme application of the scientific 
 or rationalistic method, and Taine is properly 
 regarded as the father of scientific criticism. In 
 his essay on Taine's History, Sainte-Beuve ob- 
 serves that such a formula, however interesting 
 it may be, errs in leaving out of account the inex- 
 plicable and unpredictable personal equation of 
 the writer himself. Here was the individual fact 
 which no extent of knowledge could bring under 
 scientific rule, but which must be held and con- 
 sidered in itself. And exactly here lies the dis- 
 tinction between the scientific and the sceptical 
 attitude of mind — on the one side the dominat- 
 ing desire to correlate individual facts by means of
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 71 
 
 a general cause, on the other side the grasp of the 
 individual fact at all hazards and through all 
 losses. Sainte-Beuve liked to think of himself as 
 a scientific investigator, and so far as that phrase 
 applies to laborious painstaking he is justified; 
 but his interest clung always to the individual 
 phenomenon and not to the general cause, and in 
 this respect he was, I think, the most perfect ex- 
 ample of the sceptic in modern times. Whither 
 his scepticism led him may be known by reading 
 the great and melancholy confession which he 
 wrote down at the end of his long labours on the 
 Port-Royal. There, too, he calls himself a serv- 
 ant of science and a man of truth, as indeed he 
 was; yet he continues — 
 
 But even that, how little it is! how limited is our view! 
 how quickly it reaches an end ! how it resembles a pale 
 torch lighted for a moment in the midst of a vast dark- 
 ness! and how he who desires most earnestly to know 
 his subject, who is most ambitious to seize it and has 
 most pride in depicting it, feels himself impotent and 
 unequal to his task, on that day when, in the presence 
 of the finished work and the result obtained, the intoxi- 
 cation of his energy passes away, when the final ex- 
 haustion and the inevitable distaste come over him, 
 and when he, too, perceives that he is only a fleeting 
 illusion in the bosom of the infinite Illusion. 
 
 That is the confession of a mind not essentially 
 scientific but sceptical, the certain sad conclu- 
 sion of one who grasps each experience as it 
 arises, who will not relax his hold at the bidding
 
 72 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 of any command or authority or inner need, and 
 who sees nothing in hfe but these unrelated 
 experiences. And at the other extreme, beyond 
 the believer in authority and revelation in what- 
 soever form, is the mystic, who, like the sceptic, 
 keeps a firm grip on phenomena as they appear 
 and sees in them only illusion and no ruling 
 of Providence or of a definable law, but who, 
 unlike the sceptic, knows within himself an 
 infinite something, unnamed, indefinable, the 
 one absolute reality. I scarcely know where 
 to turn in modern times for an example of the 
 .perfect mystic. Tennyson in some of his utter- 
 ances crossed the dark border, but Tennyson's 
 mind was too much concerned also with the domi- 
 nant theories of his day to afford the desired 
 model. Certainly Newman, essentially religious 
 as his temper was in some respects, stopped short 
 of this last step. In my study there hang side 
 by side the portraits of the great Cardinal and 
 the great critic, and I often compare their faces 
 as types of two of the master tendencies of the 
 nineteenth century. In the firm, sinuous line of 
 Sainte-Beuve's mouth, in the penetrating, self- 
 contained glance of the eyes, and in the smooth 
 capaciousness of the brow with the converging 
 furrows of concentration over the nose, I see the 
 supreme expression of an intelligence that saw all, 
 and comprehended all, and retained every detail, 
 surrendering nothing of itself; but of faith orreli-
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 73 
 
 gious submission I discover no look or mark. And 
 then I turn to the other portrait. Cardinal New- 
 man, as we have seen, speaks of the contraction 
 of his features under the stress of his new life. 
 The word, to one who examines the engraving of 
 Timothy Cole after the painting by Ouless, does 
 not seem quite precise. The marks of struggle 
 are visible enough, but signs of contraction, in 
 the sense of hardening or strengthening, I do not 
 see. The mouth is strong, but the lines are a lit- 
 tle relaxed ; the eyes are veiled and look wistfully 
 beyond what is immediately before them to some 
 visionary hope; the brow is high and wrinkled 
 transversely from the perplexity of an inner 
 conflict. Something has gone out of this face, the 
 contact with individual facts has been broken, 
 and in its place has come the sweetness of self- 
 surrender, the submissive pride of one who has 
 given up much that he may find all — if haply 
 he has found. 
 
 This, in the end, must be our reservation in the 
 praise due to Newman's beautiful life, that he 
 stopped short of the purest faith. He was born a 
 man with deep religious needs and instincts, a 
 man to whom the spiritual world was the absorb- 
 ing reality, beside which the material world and 
 its appearances were but as shadows gathered in 
 a dream. But he was born also in an age when 
 the old faith in an outer authority based on an 
 exact and unequivocal revelation could be main-
 
 74 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 tained only by doing violence to the integrity of 
 the believer's mind. That was his dilemma, and 
 there lay the tragedy of his choice. Two ways 
 were open to him. On the one hand, he might 
 have accepted manfully the sceptical demolition 
 of the Christian mythology and the whole fabric 
 of external religion, and on the ruins of such creeds 
 he might have risen to that supreme insight 
 which demands no revelation and is dependent 
 on no authority, but is content within itself. Do- 
 ing this he might possibly, by the depth of his re- 
 ligious nature and the eloquence of his tongue, 
 have made himself the leader of the elect out of 
 the long spiritual death that is likely to follow the 
 breaking-up of the creeds. Or, if that task seemed 
 impossible or fraught with too great peril, he 
 might have held to the national worship as a 
 symbol of the religious experience of the people, 
 and into that worship and that symbol he might 
 have breathed the new fervour of his own faith, 
 waiting reverently until by natural growth his 
 people were prepared, if ever they should be pre- 
 pared, to apprehend with him the invisible truth 
 without the forms. It is written: "Blessed are 
 they that have not seen, and yet have believed." 
 But in the hour of need his heart failed him, 
 and he demanded to see with his eyes and feel 
 with his hands. He was not strong enough to 
 hold fast to the actual discords of life and to 
 discern his vision of peace apart from their illu-
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 75 
 
 sory sphere, but found it necessary to warp the 
 facts of spiritual experience so as to make them 
 agree with a physical revelation. There is a 
 sentence in a letter of Cardinal Wiseman which 
 comes naturally to memory when one thinks of 
 the agony through which the later prelate was 
 to pass. Speaking of his own struggle as a young 
 man in Rome, Wiseman wrote: 
 
 I was fighting with subtle thoughts and venomous 
 suggestions of a fiendlike infidelity which I durst not 
 confide to any one, for there was no one that could have 
 sympathized with me. This lasted for years; but it 
 made me study and think, to conquer the plague — for 
 I can hardly call it danger — both for myself and for 
 others. . . . But during the actual struggle the simple 
 submission of faith is the only remedy. Thoughts 
 against faith must be treated at the time like tempta- 
 tions against any other virtue — put away. 
 
 There is the quick of the matter: thoughts 
 against faith must he treated at the time like temp- 
 tations against any other virtue — put away. The 
 sentiment, it must be admitted, recalls a little 
 the original metaphor of Hobbes: "For it is with 
 the mysteries of our religion as with wholesome 
 pills for the sick, which, swallowed whole, have 
 the virtue to cure, but, chewed, are for the most 
 part cast up again without effect." The same 
 idea occurs over and over again in Newman's 
 writings, is, in fact, the very basis of his Grammar 
 of Assent and of his logical system. If we look 
 closely into the reasoning by which he was driven
 
 76 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 step by step from Anglicanism to complete sur- 
 render to the authority of Rome, we shall see that 
 his logic rests on an initial assumption which im- 
 plies a certain lack of the highest faith and of that 
 sceptical attitude towards our human needs upon 
 which faith must ultimately rest. No doubt the 
 same charge might in a way be laid against all 
 those who from the beginning have professed a 
 definite religious belief. Certainly this weakness, 
 if we may so call it, is almost inextricably bound 
 up with the Christian conception of the deity and 
 of salvation; and one might retort that, if the 
 religious course of Newman can be condemned 
 as a defection from the purest insight, the same 
 condemnation must apply to the great writers 
 of the seventeenth century. We may admit the 
 retort, and yet see a difference. The very fact 
 that the central idea of a definite revelation had 
 not yet been completely undermined permitted 
 the men of that earlier age to accept it more 
 naively, so to speak, and without so grave a 
 surrender of their mental integrity. If the writ- 
 ings of such men as Henry More and the other 
 Platonists of the seventeenth century give us a 
 sense of freedom and enlargement which we can- 
 not quite get from Cardinal Newman, it is be- 
 cause these earlier theologians, notwithstanding 
 their apparent dogmatism, were in reality akin to 
 the mystics of all ages who find their peace in a 
 faith that needs no surrender. Pascal was in a
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 77 
 
 sense one of the forerunners of modern romanti- 
 cism, and there is unquestionably a taint of mor- 
 bidness in his practices; yet, withal, Pascal was 
 saved by his scepticism, and beneath his apol- 
 ogy for a fading mythology one may penetrate 
 to the depths of the purest spiritual faith. For 
 me, at least, there is a change in passing from 
 these men to Newman. Say what one will, there 
 was something in Newman's conversion of failure 
 in duty, a betrayal of the will. In succumbing to 
 an authority which promised to allay the anguish 
 of his intellect, he rejected the great mission of 
 faith, and committed what may almost be called 
 the gran rifiuto. In the agony of his conversion 
 and in his years of poignant dejection there is 
 something of the note of modern romanticism 
 intruding into religion. His inability to find 
 peace without the assurance of a personal God 
 answering to the clamour of his desires is but 
 another aspect of that illusion of the soul which 
 has lost its vision of the true infinite and seeks 
 a substitute in the limitless expansion of the 
 emotions. It has happened to me sometimes, 
 while reflecting on Newman clothed in the car- 
 dinal and crowned with ecclesiastical honours, 
 that, as by a trick of the imagination, I have 
 been carried back to the vast hall to which Vathek 
 came at the end of his journey, and that, looking 
 intently and reverently at the sublime figure on 
 his throne, I have "discerned through his bosom,
 
 78 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 which was transparent as crystal, his heart en- 
 veloped in flames." I have turned away in sad- 
 ness and awe from the face of one who had per- 
 haps the finest religious nature of the age, yet 
 failed his country at her hour of greatest need. 
 
 But it would be presumptuous to end in such 
 a strain. As we think of the many forces that 
 were shaping the thoughts and ambitions of the 
 century from which we have just emerged, of its 
 dark materialism, its intellectual pride, its greed 
 of novelty, its lust of change, its cruel egotism 
 and blind penance of sympathy, its wandering 
 virtues and vices, its legacy of spiritual bewild- 
 erment — as we think of all these, then let us 
 remember also how the great convert surrendered 
 these things and counted them as dust in the 
 balance beside the vision of his own soul face to 
 face with God. It may be that his seclusion in 
 the Oratory at Edgbaston was not unrelated to 
 the almost inevitable inability of the romantic 
 temperament to live in harmony with society; 
 but it sprang also from a nobler discontent. Who 
 will be brave to assert that his prayers and pen- 
 ance were wasted? We of to-day need his exam- 
 ple and may be the better for it, and life will be 
 a little darker when his struggle and conquest 
 are forgotten. Criticism may well stand abashed 
 before that life. More than that, it would be un- 
 critical not to remember that the Oxford Univer- 
 sity Sermons, however they may point forward to
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 79 
 
 what we were bound to regard as an act of defec- 
 tion, contain in themselves perhaps the noblest 
 appeals in the English tongue to the hazard 
 of the soul. They may well stand preeminent 
 among those witnesses to "the victory of Faith 
 over the world's power" which their author has 
 so passionately celebrated : 
 
 To see its triumph over the world's wisdom, we 
 must enter those solemn cemeteries in which are stored 
 the relics and the monuments of ancient Faith — our 
 libraries. Look along their shelves, and every name you 
 read there is, in one sense or other, a trophy set up in 
 record of the victories of Faith. How many long lives, 
 what high aims, what single-minded devotion, what 
 intense contemplation, what fervent prayer, what deep 
 erudition, what untiring diligence, what toilsome con- 
 flicts has it taken to establish its supremacy! This has 
 been the object which has given meaning to the life of 
 Saints, and which is the subject-matter of their history. 
 For this they have given up the comforts of earth and 
 the charities of home, and surrendered themselves to an 
 austere rule, nay, even to confessorship and persecution, 
 if so be they could make some small offering, or do 
 some casual service, or provide some additional safe- 
 guard towards the great work which was in progress.
 
 WALTER PATER
 
 WALTER PATER 
 
 My own experience with Pater may be given 
 as typical, I believe, of the various feelings his 
 work arouses in different readers. As a very 
 young man, immersed in the current of roman- 
 ticism that ran even stronger then than it does 
 now, I was quite dazzled by the glamour of Pater's 
 style and by the half-mystical sensuousness of 
 his philosophy. Later, when a little more know- 
 ledge of books and men had shown me the mis- 
 chief that the romantic ideas had caused and 
 ^ere still causing to literature and to life, there 
 came a violent revulsion, and for years I was un- 
 able to look into one of Pater's books without 
 a feeling of irritation. His slowly manipulated 
 sentences seemed to me merely meretricious, and I 
 could not dissociate his Epicureanism from the 
 intellectual and moral dissolution which from the 
 beginning had been so insidiously at work in the 
 romantic school, and from which, as I thought, I 
 had myself so barely escaped. Still later came 
 another change. With the tolerance of maturity 
 and of that scepticism, perhaps, which comes to 
 most of us with looking too intently into the tan- 
 gle of things, I grew able to distinguish between 
 the good and the bad. It seemed to me now, as 
 before, that what Pater really stood for was in the
 
 84 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 last analysis false and dangerous, but at the same 
 time I was attracted to him because, after all, he 
 did stand for something distinct and consistent. 
 And I learned to appreciate his style, because his 
 words were so deliberately and cunningly chosen 
 for a known purpose. Some one has expressed 
 repugnance to him because he wrote English as 
 if it were a dead language; on the contrary, I 
 came to see that no language is really dead, how- 
 ever censurable it may be in other respects, so 
 long as it has a definite and deeply implicated 
 emotional content and can convey to others the 
 same emotion with calculated precision. 
 
 Whatever else one may say of Pater, however 
 one may like or dislike him, he stands in the com- 
 plex, elusive nineteenth century agj^clear sign of 
 something fixed and known. But he performs 
 this office not as a critic, as he is commonly reck- 
 oned; indeed, of the critical mind, exactly speak- 
 ing, he had little, being at once .something more 
 and something less than this. The hardest test, 
 of the critic, in the exercise of his special func-' 
 tion, is his tact and sureness in valuing the pro- ; 
 ductions of his own day. But in that tact and 
 sureness, which come only with the last refine- 
 ment of self-knowledge. Pater was never an adept. 
 Take, for instance, his reviews of contemporary 
 books collected under the title of Essays from the 
 Guardian; they contain no doubt a good deal 
 that is worth reading, but they lack discrimin-
 
 ) 
 
 WALTER PATER 85 
 
 ation and leave in the mind no sense of finely 
 estimated values; their very language, as show- 
 ing the uncertainty of the author's mental pro- 
 cedure, falls at times into the most awkward 
 involutions. 
 
 Nor was his power of discrimination any 
 firmer when dealing with the past. It is of course 
 a perfectly legitimate, perhaps the higher, func- 
 tion of criticism to take the expression of life as 
 it comes to us in literature, and to develop there- /^ 
 from a philosophy and vision of the critic's own; 
 and this was the deliberate intention of Pater. 
 Such an aim is entirely justifiable, but it is not 
 justifiable to misunderstand or falsify the basis 
 on which the critic's own fabric is to be raised. 
 If he is true critic his first concern must be the 
 right interpretation of the documents before him, 
 and whatever else he may have to offer must 
 proceed from primary veracity of understand- 
 ing. Just here Pater faulted, or defaulted. He 
 has much to say that is interesting, even per- 
 suasive, about the great leaders and movements 
 of the past, but too often his interpretation, when 
 the spell of his manner is broken, turns out to be 
 fundamentally wrong, springing not from a de- 
 sire to see the facts and fit them into his argu- 
 ment, but from a purely literary ambition to 
 illustrate and authorize a preconceived theory 
 of life. There is, beneath much erudition and a 
 certain surface accuracy, no search for la vraie
 
 86 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 verite, to use one of his own phrases; and this 
 disregard of the truth passes inevitably into his 
 own superimposed philosophy, is indeed its key- 
 note. 
 
 This may seem a harsh judgement to pass on 
 a writer who has been one of the main influences 
 in later nineteenth-century literature, but it can 
 be easily substantiated. In his three greatest 
 works — Plato and Plantonism, Marius the Epi- 
 curean, and The Renaissance — he has dealt with 
 three spiritual crises of history; and in each case 
 he has, gravely, though with varying degrees, 
 falsified the reality. Plato and Platonism is a 
 book that every student of Greek and of life 
 should read; it is in itself a meticulously wrought 
 work of art in which each detail is fitted into its 
 place to create a total designed effect; but that 
 effect, presented as an interpretation of Plato, is 
 of a kind, it can scarcely be said too emphat- 
 ically, that differs absolutely from what Plato 
 himself meant to convey in his dialogues, and 
 is nothing less than a betrayal of critical trustr" 
 In one of his chapters Pater gives a picture, based 
 ostensibly on Karl Otfried Miiller, of the Doric 
 life in Lacedaemon as the actuality which Plato 
 had in mind when he conceived his ideal city- 
 state. It is a picture of cool colours and deli- 
 ciously subdued harmonies, an idyl beautiful in 
 itself, and not without lessons for the youth of 
 to-day in its insistence on the sheer loveliness
 
 WALTER PATER 87 
 
 and exquisite pleasures that may flow from cal- 
 culated renunciation and self-suppression. It has 
 its own wisdom, shown especially in the develop- 
 ment of the text, suggested by Miiller, to the ef- 
 fect that "in a Doric State education was, on the 
 whole, a matter of more importance than gov- 
 ernment." But it has one grave defect: it is not 
 true to the facts^ This city, as the portrait fin- 
 ally arranges itself, is simply not the cold, hard 
 Sparta that lay on the banks of the Eurotas, but 
 some glorified Auburn wafted into an Arcadia of 
 the imagination. At the end of the chapter, after 
 giving a brave account of the training, or askesis, 
 by which the Lacedaemonian youth were drilled 
 for life, Pater represents an Athenian visitor as 
 asking: "Why this strenuous task-work, day 
 after day; why this loyalty to a system, so costly 
 to you individually, though it may be thought to 
 have survived its original purpose; this labor- 
 ious, endless education, which does not propose 
 to give you anything very useful or enjoyable in 
 itself?" The question is apt, and Pater puts the 
 answer into the mouth of a Spartan youth: "To 
 the end that I myself may be a perfect work of 
 art, issuing thus into the eyes of all Greece." — 
 The discipline of Lycurgus, that is to say, was to 
 the end that the young men of Sparta might be 
 "a spectacle, aesthetically, at least, very inter- 
 esting" (the words are Pater's) to the rest of 
 Greece! Really, a more complete perversion of
 
 88 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 history has not often been conceived. What the 
 institutions of Sparta actually stood for may be 
 known in a word from the opinion of the Lace- 
 
 \ dsemonian in Plato's Laws; they were ordered to 
 the end that Sparta might conquer the other 
 
 i States in war, nothing more nor less — ^(^-re 
 TToXc/Ao) viKav ras aXXas ttoAcis. Not the indulgence 
 of vanity, however chastely controlled, but the 
 need of self-preservation and the terrible law of 
 the survival of the fittest made the Lacedaemo- 
 nian men and women the comeliest of Hellas; 
 they were warriors and the mothers of warriors, 
 not aesthetes.^ 
 
 And this same misrepresentation runs through 
 much of Pater's direct analysis of Platonism. 
 Pater saw, as all who study Plato are forced to 
 see, that the heart of Plato's doctrine lay in his 
 conception of ideas, in his use and enforcement of 
 dialectic or the process of passing intellectually 
 from particulars to generals. But Pater could not 
 help feeling also that there was something in this 
 dialectical procedure that did not accord with his 
 particular notion of aesthetics, and he was bound 
 if he accepted Platonism — as it was his desire to 
 assimilate all the great movements of history — 
 to interpret Platonic ideas in his own way. The 
 
 1 A critic of this essay has accused me of misrepresenting Plato. It is 
 true that the Athenian Stranger, who speaks for the author in the 
 Laws, sees a higher meaning) in the institution of Lycurgus tiian is 
 admitted by the Lacedaemonian; but certainly, whatever may have been 
 the bye-product, so to speak, of the Spartan constitution, self-preserva- 
 tion and conQuest were its first axLd main object.
 
 WALTER PATER 89 
 
 result is a striking passage in the chapter on The 
 Doctrine of Plato : 
 
 To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are 
 meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think 
 at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his 
 meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to 
 genus and species and differentia, into formal classes, 
 under general notions, and with — yes! with written 
 labels fluttering on the stalks, instead of blossoms — a 
 botanic or "physic" garden, as they used to say, in- 
 stead of our flower-garden and orchard. And yet (it 
 must be confessed on the other hand) what we actually 
 see, see and hear, is more interesting than ever. . . . 
 
 So it is with the shell, the gem, with a glance of the 
 eye; so it may be with the moral act, with the con- 
 dition of the mind, or a feeling. . . . Generalization, 
 whatever Platonists, or Plato himself at mistaken mo- 
 rnents, may have to say about it, is a method, not of 
 obliterating the concrete phenomenon, but of enriching 
 It, with the joint perspective, the significance, the ex- 
 pressiveness, of all other things beside. What broad- 
 cast light he enjoys! — that scholar, confronted with 
 the sea-shell, for instance, or with some enigma of hered- 
 ity in himself or another, with some condition of a 
 particular soul, in circumstances which may never pre- 
 cisely so occur again; in the contemplation of that sin- 
 gle phenomenon, or object, or situation. He not only 
 sees, but understands (thereby only seeing the more) 
 and will, therefore, also remember. The significance 
 of the particular object he will retain, by use of his in- 
 tellectual apparatus of notion and general law, as, to 
 use Plato's own figure, fluid matter may be retained in 
 vessels, not indeed of unbaked clay, but of alabaster 
 or bronze. So much by way of apology for general 
 ideas — abstruse, or intangible, or dry and seedy and 
 wooden, as we may sometimes think them. -^
 
 go THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Now in criticizing this apology of Pater for 
 Plato's dialectic I would not fall, as some have 
 fallen, into the opposite and no less erroneous 
 extreme. To represent Plato as an enemy of the 
 decent and comely things of life, as an iconoclast 
 of art and poetry and music in themselves, would 
 be to forget some of the great passages in his 
 Republic and other dialogues, in which the prac- 
 tical effect of beautiful things upon conduct is 
 largely recognized, and in which beauty in the 
 abstract is placed by the side of the true and the 
 good in the supreme trinity of ideas. I would 
 even admit that much of what Pater says in 
 regard to Plato's conception of beauty is sound 
 and worthy of emphasis. He has done well in 
 drawing out the element of discipline in the 
 Platonic aesthetics — the value of the capacity 
 for correction, of patience, of crafty reserve, of 
 intellectual astringency, which Plato demanded 
 of the poet and the musician and of every true 
 citizen of the ideal Republic. Plato, as Pater 
 rightly observes, was of all men faithful to the old 
 Greek saying, Beauty is hard to attain. These 
 aspects of art and of beautiful living never more 
 than to-day needed to be recognized and incul- 
 cated. But withal Pater's final interpretation of 
 Plato in these matters is fundamentally wrong, 
 and ends in a creed which Plato would have re- 
 jected with utter indignation. To recommend 
 the pursuit of ideas for the sake of lending
 
 WALTER PATER 91 
 
 £iquancy to the phenomenal, to use the intellect- 
 ual apparatus in order to enhance the signi- 
 ficance of the particular object, to undergo phil- 
 osophical discipline for the purpose of adding 
 zest to sensuous pleasure, in a word to make truth 
 the servant of beauty, and goodness the servant 
 of the body, is to uphold a doctrine essentially 
 and uncompromisingly the contrary of every- 
 thing that Plato believed and held sacred. To 
 T6II0W such a course, however purely and aus- 
 terely beauty may be conceived, is, as Plato says, 
 to be ^TTwv Twv Kakwv, the subject of beautiful 
 things and not their master. Plato taught that 
 the perception of beauty in the particular object 
 was one of the means by which a man might rise 
 to contemplation of the idea of beauty in the in- 
 "tellectual world, and wherever he saw the danger 
 of inverting this order, as Pater and many other 
 self-styled Platonists have inverted it, he could 
 speak of art with all the austerity of a Puritan. 
 There is no sentence in the dialogues that cuts 
 more deeply into the heart of his philosophy than 
 the foreboding exclamation: "When any one pre- 
 fers beauty to virtue, what is this but the real and 
 utter dishonour of the soul?" 
 
 From the consideration of Plato and Platonism 
 we turn naturally to the greatest of Pater's 
 works, Marius the Epicurean, and here again we 
 are confronted by a false interpretation of one of 
 the critical moments of history. The theme of
 
 92 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Marius, I need scarcely say, is the life of a young 
 Italian who, in the age of Marcus Aurelius, is 
 searching for some principle of conduct amid the 
 dissolution of all traditional laws, for the peace 
 which his troubled heart craves and cannot dis- 
 cern. He sees the world about him, the world at 
 least that has outgrown the ancestral belief in the 
 gods and has not sunk into frivolity or sullen 
 scepticism, divided between the two sects of the 
 Epicureans and the Stoics, and the larger part of 
 the story is really a disquisition on the efifect of 
 these opposed philosophies upon the human soul. 
 Much of this is subtly conceived, and especially 
 the adaptation of the legend of Cupid and Psyche 
 from the Golden Book of Apuleius, and the long 
 discourse of Marcus Aurelius contrived with 
 delicate adjustment from the Meditations, are 
 among the rare things of literature; although 
 even here there is a certain taint, an insinuating 
 betrayal of the truth, in the factitious charms 
 lent to these philosophies. Apuleius may have 
 been, in a sense, decadent, but he was not lan- 
 guorous as Pater presents him in translation, and 
 Marcus Aurelius is in expression crabbed and 
 scholastic and very far from the smooth periods of 
 his imitator. In his hesitancy between these two 
 philosophies Marius is revolted by the indiffer- 
 ence of the Emperor to the sufferings of the world, 
 and leans towards a kind of sentimental and 
 chastened Epicureanism. At the last, however,
 
 WALTER PATER 93 
 
 he is introduced into the home of a Christian 
 family Hving outside of Rome, is fascinated by 
 the purity and decorum of their hves, and is him- 
 self in the way of conversion, when, after the man- 
 ner of romantic heroes, he fades out of existence : 
 
 The people around his bed were praying fervently — 
 Abi! Abi! Anima Christiana! In the moments of his 
 extreme helplessness their mystic bread had been 
 placed, had descended like a snow-flake from the sky, 
 between his lips. Gentle fingers had applied to hands 
 and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses, 
 through which the world had come and gone for him, 
 now so dim and obstructed, a medicinable oil. 
 
 So he dies the death of the soul that is naturally 
 Christian, finding in the grace of these tender 
 ministrations the peace so long desired and 
 missed. In this choice of Epicureanism instead of 
 the harsher Stoic creed as a preparation for Christ- 
 ian faith, Pater, I think, shows a true knowledge 
 of the human heart. Pascal, it will be remembered, 
 found himself fifteen centuries later face to face 
 with the same contrasted tenets of Epicurus and 
 "Zeno which were dividing the minds of Europe, 
 which are indeed the expression of the two main 
 tendencies not of one time but of all times of 
 those who attempt to stop in a religious philoso- 
 phy just short of religion; and Pascal, too, saw 
 that the step from Epicureanism to Christianity 
 was easier than from Stoicism. For the mind that 
 craves unity and the resting-place of some event-
 
 94 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 ual calm may be deceived by the naturalistic 
 pantheism of the Stoic creed and, so to speak, be- 
 numbed into a dull acquiescence, whereas from 
 the desolation of the Epicurean flux it is more 
 likely to be driven into the supernatural unity of 
 religion, while holding the world as a place of 
 illusory mutation. So far Pater, in his account of 
 the relation of the Pagan philosophies and Christ- 
 ianity, was psychologically right; but his por- 
 trayal of Christianity itself one is compelled to 
 condemn in the same terms as his portrayal of 
 Platonism, Read the story of Marius at the home 
 of the Christian Cecilia and at the celebration of 
 the mass, and you will feel that here is no picture 
 of a militant faith in preparation for the conquest 
 of the world, of a sect at death grips with a whole 
 civilization and girding itself for moral regenera- 
 tion, but the report of a pleasant scene where the 
 eye is charmed and the ear soothed by the same 
 chaste and languid loveliness that seemed to 
 Pater to rule in Sparta and the ideal city of 
 Plato. "Some transforming spirit was at work," 
 he writes of the Christian life, "to harmonize 
 contrasts, to deepen expression — a spirit which, 
 in its dealing with the elements of ancient life, 
 was guided by a wonderful tact of selection, 
 exclusion, juxtaposition, begetting thereby a 
 unique effect of freshness, a grave yet wholesome 
 beauty." And in his dreams Marius is repre- 
 sented as conj uring up the ' ' nights of the beautiful
 
 WALTER PATER 95 
 
 house of Cecilia, its lights and flowers, of Cecilia 
 herself moving among the lilies." No doubt it 
 would be false, as Pater asserts it would be, to set 
 over "against that divine urbanity and modera- 
 tion the old error of Montanus" (Montanism, it 
 may be observed by the way, was at that date 
 quite young, but no matter, in the romantic con- 
 vention everything must be "old") — it would be 
 false, I say, to set up as the complete Christian 
 ideal the "fanatical revolt" of Montanus, "sour, 
 falsely anti-mundane, ever with an air of ascetic 
 affectation, and a bigoted distaste in particular 
 for all the peculiar graces of womanhood." It is 
 well to avoid extremes in either direction. Yet if 
 choice had to be made between the sweet volup- 
 tuousness of religion as it appeared to Marius and 
 the moral rigour of Tertullian, the great Montan- 
 ist preacher who was contemporary with Marius, 
 it would not be hard to say on which side lay the 
 real Christianity of the second century. Against 
 Pater's "elegance of sanctity," as he calls it, a 
 Christian might exclaim with Tertullian that 
 " truth is not on the surface but in the inmost 
 heart (non in super fide est sed in medullis).'' 
 Pater, borrowing the phrase from Tertullian, de- 
 scribes the death of Marius as that of a soul natur- 
 ally Christian. Beside that picture of a soul daint- 
 ily dreaming itself into eternity it is enlightening 
 to set the original apostrophe of Tertullian him- 
 self to the anima naturaliter Christiana :
 
 96 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 But I summon thee, not such as when formed in 
 schools, trained in libraries, fed in Attic academies and 
 porches, thou blurtest forth wisdom — I address thee 
 simple, and rude, and uncultured, and untaught, such 
 as they possess who possess thee and nothing else; the 
 bare soul from the road, the street, the weaver's shop. 
 
 The simple fact is that in Marius we have no 
 real conversion from Epicureanism to religion, 
 no Christianity at all as it would have been 
 recognized by St. Paul or St. Augustine, but 
 only another manifestation of that sestheticism 
 which Pater sucked from the romantic school of 
 his century and disguised in the phraseology 
 of ancient faith. To write thus was to betray 
 , Christianity with a kiss. 
 
 ''' In the third of Pater's major works, The 
 Renaissance, there is again a reading of Paterism 
 into the past, but without the perversion of spirit 
 and without the offensiveness that some may feel 
 in his treatment of Platonism and Christianity. 
 Not a little of the romanticism from which Pater 
 drew his philosophy may be traced back to the 
 Italy of Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci ; but the 
 tone, the energy, the eihos, are changed. The 
 nature of the change cannot be better displayed 
 than in the famous description of La Gioconda, 
 which, if it may seem too familiar for quotation, 
 is too characteristic of Pater to be omitted ; as in- 
 deed the whole essay on Leonardo may be taken as 
 the subtlest expression of his genius:
 
 WALTER PATER 97 
 
 La Gioconda [he writes of the portrait now, alas, lost] 
 is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece. . . . We 
 all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its mar- 
 ble chair, in that circle of fantastic rocks, as in some 
 faint light under sea. . . . The presence that rose thus 
 so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in 
 the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. 
 Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are 
 come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty 
 wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, 
 little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic rev- 
 eries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment be- 
 side one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful 
 women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled 
 by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies 
 has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the 
 world have etched and moulded there, in that which 
 they have of power to refine and make expressive the 
 outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of 
 Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spirit- 
 ual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the 
 Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than 
 the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she 
 has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of 
 the grave ; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps 
 their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange 
 webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the 
 mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mo- 
 ther of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the 
 sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy 
 with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and 
 tinged the eyelids and the hands. 
 
 Now I shall not criticize this famous passage 
 for its treatment of plain facts. Any one who 
 cares to see how far Pater has departed from the
 
 / 
 
 98 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 inconveniences of history may consult the mono- 
 graph of M. Salomon Reinach in Number 2 of the 
 Bulletin des Musees de France for 1909. And after 
 all Pater was not dealing with facts, but with 
 emotions; as a "lover of strange souls," to use his 
 own phrase, he was analyzing the impression 
 made upon him by this picture, and trying to 
 reach through it a definition of the chief elements 
 of Leonardo's genius. Yet viewed even in that 
 light the description rings false — not so false as 
 his interpretations of Platonism and Christianity, 
 but still subtly perversive of the truth. It may be 
 true in a way that the genius of Leonardo, as 
 Goethe said, had "thought itself weary {miide 
 sich gedacht)" ; but the deadly and deliberate lan- 
 gour that trails through the lines of Pater — not, 
 I admit, without its own ambiguous and troub- 
 ling beauty — is something essentially different 
 from even the most ambiguous forms of Leon- 
 ardo's art. And whatever may have been the sins 
 of Leonardo in the flesh, and whatever may have 
 been his intellectual wanderings or indifferences, 
 I doubt if he would have understood that strange 
 and frequent identification among the romantics 
 of the soul and disease. Into the face of Mona 
 Lisa, says Pater, "the soul with all its maladies 
 has passed ! " as if health were incompatible with 
 "the possession of a soul. One suspects that the 
 maladies which Pater had in mind — and he 
 echoes the repeated boasting of his school that
 
 WALTER PATER gg 
 
 their weakness and impotence were a sign of 
 spiritual preeminence — one suspects that these 
 romantic maladies had quite another source than 
 excess of soul. This again is Paterism masquer- 
 ading under a great name of the past. 
 
 The simple truth is that Pater was in no proper 
 sense of the word a critic. He did not on the one 
 hand from his own fixed point of view judge the 
 great movements of history and the great artists 
 in their reality; nor on the other hand did he 
 show any dexterity in changing his own point 
 of view and entering sympathetically into other \ 
 moods than his own. To him history was only ' 
 an extension of his own Ego, and he saw himself | 
 whithersoever he turned his eyes. The result" 
 may be something greater than criticism — 
 though this I should myself deny — it is cer- 
 tainly something different from criticism. To 
 form any just estimate of Pater's work, then, we 
 must forget the critical form in which so much of 
 his writing is couched and regard the substance 
 of his own philosophy apart from any apparent 
 relation to the period or person to which it is 
 transferred. And here we are aided by the sin- 
 gular consistency of his nature. There is no need 
 with Pater, as happens with most other men, es- 
 pecially with those who treat their themes his- 
 torically, to distinguish between what is his own 
 and what he has taken up from other sources; 
 nor is the problem complicated by any change in
 
 100 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 point of view as he passed from one period of his 
 career to another or from influence to influence. 
 All is of a piece, and all is the perfectly logi- 
 cal outgrowth of a single attitude towards the 
 world. 
 
 And this we see in his life itself as clearly as in 
 his writings. Walter Horatio Pater was born at 
 Shad well, between Wapping and Stepney, in 
 1839. His father, a physician who had been born 
 in America, died while Walter was a young child, 
 and the family moved to an old house with a 
 large garden at Enfield — the pleasant suburb 
 where just a few years earlier the Clarkes describe 
 "the most enchanting walks" which Charles 
 and Mary Lamb used to take with them "in all 
 directions of the lovely neighbourhood," but 
 where Lamb called himself whimsically "a stub- 
 born Eloisa in this detestable paraclete." There 
 is a delicately wrought study of Pater's, called 
 The Child in the House, which shows, if we may 
 accept it as partly autobiographical, the influ- 
 ences that surrounded these years and the tem- 
 perament of the man already marked in the boy. 
 He speaks of the rapid growth in him "of a cer- 
 tain capacity of fascination by bright colour and 
 choice form — the sweet curvings, for instance, 
 of the lips of those who seemed to him comely 
 persons, modulated in such delicate unison to the 
 things they said or sang, — marking early the 
 activity in him of a more than customary sensu-
 
 WALTER PATER loi 
 
 Qusaess . 'the lust of the eye,' as the Preacher 
 says, which might lead him, one day, how far!" 
 All these impressions are subdued in his memory 
 to a passive alertness, and such they no doubt 
 were actually in the boy's experience. "So he 
 yielded himself to these things, to be played upon 
 by them like a musical instrument, and began to 
 note with deepening watchfulness, but always 
 with some puzzled, unutterable longing in his 
 enjoyment, the phases of the seasons and of the 
 growing or waning day, down even to the shad- 
 owy changes wrought on bare wall or ceiHng." 
 The rapture of the elusive moment, the econom- 
 ical indulgence of the senses, the feeling and 
 thought finely responsive to the fair things of the 
 world, were, it should seem, born in him; and in 
 the end these were his deliberate philosophy. 
 
 In 1858 Pater went up to Oxford, and at Ox- 
 ford, except for a period of eight years in London, 
 he resided until his death in 1894. He first en- 
 tered Queen's College, but in 1864 was elected 
 to a Fellowship at Brasenose, with which college 
 he was henceforth identified, although he had 
 also a home outside of the collegiate walls. His 
 existence now took on the colour it was to main- 
 tain until the end. Brasenose itself is described 
 by Mr. A. C. Benson, from whom I have taken 
 most of these details of Pater's life, as "one of 
 the sternest and severest in aspect of Oxford col- 
 leges": 
 
 UBF.ARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF GALirORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 102 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 It has no grove or pleasaunce to frame its sombre 
 antiquity in a setting of colour and tender freshness. 
 Its black and blistered front looks out on a little piazza 
 occupied by the stately mouldering dome of the Rad- 
 cliflfe Library; beyond is the solid front of Hertford, and 
 the quaint pseudo-Gothic court of All Souls. To the 
 north lies a dark lane, over the venerable wall of which 
 looms the huge chestnut of Exeter, full in spring of stiff 
 white spires of heavy-scented bloom. To the south a 
 dignified modern wing, built long after Pater's election, 
 overlooks the bustling High Street. To the west the 
 college lies back to back with the gloomy and austere 
 courts of Lincoln. There is no sense of space, of leisure- 
 liness, of ornament, about the place; it rather looks like 
 a fortress of study. 
 
 Something of the austere character of the col- 
 lege passed into Pater's own ways of living. His 
 rooms were small and furnished with a taste that 
 might be called parsimoniously aesthetic. They 
 were "painted in greenish white, and hung with 
 three or four line-engravings." A few Greek coins 
 were his chief dehght, and he used also to keep 
 before him a vase of dried rose-leaves for their 
 colour and scent. His habits were singularly quiet 
 and regular. Although he was always easily ap- 
 proached, and to greet a guest would rise from 
 the midst of one of his most complicated sen- 
 tences without the least irritation, yet he mixed 
 little in general society and took small part in the 
 college routine. As tutor and lecturer he per- 
 formed his duties punctiliously, but with per- 
 sonal reserve and without enthusiasm. So far as
 
 WALTER PATER 103 
 
 he shared in the discipline of the institution he 
 was strict and even excitable, and the story is 
 told that once, having to quell a bit of under- 
 graduate rowdyism, he turned the hose into the 
 offender's bedroom to such good effect that he 
 had afterwards to allow the inmate to sleep out 
 of bounds. With strangers he was precise and re- 
 served, not without a leaven of paradox in his 
 conversation which often led to misunderstand- 
 ings; but it may be observed here emphatically 
 that the rumours of his morbid immorality are 
 entirely unfounded. In the society of intimate 
 friends he showed a sense of humour and an in- 
 terest in trivial things which would not be ex- 
 pected from his manner of writing. Blithe is one 
 of his favourite words, and those who knew him 
 well speak of a certain blitheness — "blitheness 
 and repose" — in his manner; yet withal the last 
 impression he seems to have made was that of a 
 man a little fatigued. "Could he have foreseen 
 the weariness of the way!" he said of one of his 
 heroes, and that feeling of weariness, of futility 
 in the hopes and acquisitions of life, lay always, 
 one thinks, at the bottom of his heart. "The 
 only attitude I ever observed in Pater," wrote a 
 friend, "the only mood I saw him in, was a sort 
 of weary courtesy with which he used to treat me, 
 with somehow a deep kindness shining through." 
 This, too, was the picture he presented to those 
 who saw him walking, with bowed head and, in
 
 104 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 later years, a slight hesitation in his steps. He Is 
 said to have had the appearance of a retired mili- 
 tary officer, but his complexion is described as 
 having the pallor of old ivory. 
 
 He was not a laborious scholar; he was not 
 even a great reader of books, and in later years 
 he confined himself almost exclusively to Plato 
 and the Bible and the few other masterpieces 
 which gave him the intellectual and artistic sus- 
 tenance he craved. His own writing was slow 
 and painful ; it was his habit to write on alternate 
 lines of ruled paper, leaving space for revision, 
 and often copying out a composition more than 
 once and even having it privately set up in type 
 so that he might judge better its effect. His 
 work in fact was only one aspect or expression of 
 that art of life which he seems to have practised 
 from youth, whether it was in its origin a delib- 
 erate mental choice or, more likely, the instinct- 
 ive prompting of his temperament which was 
 afterwards reinforced by reading and observa- 
 tion — an art made up of timidity and persist- 
 ence and lucid self-interrogation, seeking its ex- 
 quisite satisfactions more in what it renounced 
 than in what it appropriated from the world's 
 ambiguous gifts and pleasures. 
 
 If we search for the sources of his philosophy, 
 apart from the original character of the man 
 himself, we shall find them without difficulty. 
 He was one of those on whom Goethe's ideal of
 
 WALTER PATER 105 
 
 an ar tistically rounded culture early imposed 
 itself, and to this model he later added the en- 
 thu siasm and the " divinatory power over the 
 HeTTenic world " of Goethe's master, Winckel- 
 mann . Among English writers he himself would 
 probably have ascribed the chief influence upon 
 him to Ruskin, but as a matter of fact I suspect 
 that the more dominating personal influence came 
 from another and more insinuating mind — from 
 one who meets us at every turn as we attempt 
 to trace the artistic impulses of the later nine- 
 teenth century, and who was, perhaps, the most 
 perfect type that England has known of the ro- 
 mantic temperament turned purely to art. I do 
 not certainly know that Pater ever met Rossetti 
 in the flesh, but he recognized that great and sad 
 genius as one of his teachers. William Sharp 
 (" Fiona Macleod") knew Rossetti as well as he 
 knew Pater, and he once wrote to Pater in re- 
 gard to these subtle relationships: 
 
 Years ago, in Oxford, how often we talked these mat- 
 ters over! I have often recalled one evening, in par- 
 ticular, often recollected certain words of yours: and 
 never more keenly than when I have associated them 
 with the early work of Rossetti, in both arts, but pre- 
 eminently in painting: "To my mind Rossetti is the 
 most significant man among us. More torches will be lit 
 from his flame — or torches lit at his flame — than per- 
 haps even enthusiasts like yourself imagine." 
 
 But however Pater may seem to have lighted 
 his torch at Rossetti's flame, we must not over-
 
 io6 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 look the strong impersonal influence that eman- 
 ated from the memories and the very stones of 
 Oxford. We all know Matthew Arnold's apos- 
 trophe to the "home of lost causes, and forsaken 
 beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible 
 loyalties"; to the dream-city that "lies, spread- 
 ing her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering 
 from her towers the last enchantments of the 
 Middle Ages." The call of Oxford is, as her lover 
 says, to beauty and to higher ideals; but there is 
 an aspect of her appeal which is not without its 
 fascinating danger. From the beginning she has 
 been the home of secluded causes as well as lost 
 causes ; she has stood always as a protest against 
 the coarse and ephemeral changes of civilization, 
 but she has maintained this centre of calm too 
 much by a withdrawal from life rather than by 
 strong control. Hers at her origin was the ideal 
 of monasticism and of faith fleeing the world; 
 her loyalty to the king was strongest when loy- 
 alty meant a separation from the great powers of 
 political expansion; her religious revival in the 
 nineteenth century not only was the desire of re- 
 suscitating an impossible past, but sought also 
 to sever the forms of worship entirely from the in- 
 fluence of the State and of the people. Certainly 
 much good has come out of this pride of seclu- 
 sion and waves of spiritual force have continu- 
 ally emanated from this reservoir of memory; 
 but it is true also that these influences have
 
 WALTER PATER 107 
 
 sometimes ended in sterility or have tended to 
 widen rather than close up the unfortunate gap 
 between the utiHtarian and the sentimental phases 
 of English life. In a word, they have been too 
 often a reinforcement to the romantic ideal of the 
 imagination as a worship of beauty isolated from, 
 and in the end despised by, the real interests of 
 life, and too seldom a reinforcement of the classi- 
 cal ideal of the imagination as an active power in 
 life itself. The very contrast of the enchanted 
 towers of Oxford with the hideous chimneys of 
 one of England's great manufacturing towns 
 seems to give to the university an atmosphere of 
 aesthetic unreality. Ideas do not circulate here 
 as they do in a university like that of Paris, sit- 
 uated at the heart of the national life, and in too 
 many of the books that now come from Oxford 
 one feels the breath of a fine traditional culture 
 that has somehow every excellent quality except 
 vitality. And so it was not strange to see the 
 Oxford Movement, especially so-called, depart 
 further and further from practical and intellectual 
 realities and lose itself in an empty and stubborn 
 ritualism. Thought is the greatest marrer of 
 good looks, said Oscar Wilde, and that is why 
 there are so many good-looking young curates in 
 England. The aestheticism of William Morris 
 and Burne-Jones was a conscious revolt from the 
 vapidity of the later stages of the Oxford Move- 
 ment to a pure and Pagan sensuousness. Ros-
 
 io8 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 setti gave body and passion to the revolt, and 
 Pater, following in their steps, lent a scholastic 
 authority to their artistic achievements. Pater- 
 ism might without great injustice be defined as 
 the quintessential spirit of Oxford emptied of 
 the wholesome intrusions of the world — its 
 pride of isolation reduced to sterile self-absorp- 
 tion, its enchantment of beauty alembicated into 
 a faint Epicureanism, its discipline of learning 
 changed into a voluptuous economy of sensa- 
 tions, its golden calm stagnated into languid ele- 
 gance. 
 
 In judging Pater, then, we must not come to 
 him for interpretive or constructive criticism, 
 constructive, that is, as based on a correct in- 
 sight into the material he pretends to use, but for 
 his own philosophy of life. And in this judge- 
 ment two things are to be taken into account : on 
 the one hand, how consistent and clear he was in 
 the expression of this philosophy of life, and on 
 the other hand, what the value of this philoso- 
 phy is in itself. For the first the answer is all 
 in his favour. From the beginning to the end, as 
 we have seen, there is scarcely a discordant note 
 in his writing; whether he was posing as an inter- 
 preter of Plato or early Christianity or the Re- 
 naissance, he was in reality exhibiting only him- 
 self. It is true that in his essays on Wordsworth 
 and one or two other modern writers he seems 
 for a while to escape from the magic circle of him- 
 
 V
 
 WALTER PATER 109 
 
 self, but the escape is more apparent than real. 
 So much for his consistency, and his clearness is 
 no less complete. More than once he gives di- 
 rect expression to his philosophy, nowhere else 
 so explicitly as in the conclusion to his volume 
 on The Renaissance. The motto of that chap- 
 ter is the famous saying of Heracleitus, All things 
 are in a state of flux and nothing abides, and the 
 chapter itself is but a brief exhortation to make 
 the most of our human life amidst this endless 
 and ceaseless mutation of which we are ourselves 
 an ever-changing element: 
 
 The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, 
 towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a 
 life of constant and eager observation. Every moment 
 some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on 
 the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest ; some mood 
 of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irre- 
 sistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment 
 only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, 
 is^the end. A counted number of pulses only is given 
 to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in 
 them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? 
 How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and 
 be present always at the focus where the greatest num- 
 ber of vital forces unite in their purest energy? 
 
 To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to main- 
 tain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might 
 even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after, 
 all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and mean- 
 tiine it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any 
 two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all 
 melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite
 
 r 
 
 no THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems 
 by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or 
 any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, 
 and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the 
 face of one's friend. 
 
 That is the sum of Pater's philosophy as it is 
 everywhere impHcitly expressed in critical essay 
 or fiction : the admonition to train our body and 
 mind to the highest point of acuteness so as to 
 catch, as it were, each fleeting glimpse of beauty 
 on the wing, and by the intensity of our partici- 
 pation to compensate for the insecurity of the 
 >vorld's gifts; in a word, the admonition to make ' 
 of life itself an art. Now we ought, I think, to be 
 grateful first of all to any one who recalls to us 
 and utters in manifold ways this lesson of grace 
 within answering to grace without. Perhaps no 
 other philosophy to-day has so completely passed 
 out of the general range of vision as this doctrine 
 of the art of living, which has been one of the 
 guiding principles of the greatest ages of the past. 
 This is not to say that our lives are therefore ne- 
 cessarily aimless. Exacting ambitions and high 
 purposes we may follow with unflagging zeal; 
 it is possible that never before in history has the 
 individual man striven more keenly for some goal 
 which he saw clearly at the end of his path — some 
 possession of wealth or power or learning or virtue 
 — but how rarely in our society one meets the 
 man who to his other purposes adds the design
 
 WALTER PATER iii 
 
 of making his life itself a rounded work of art, 
 ordering his acts and manners and thoughts and 
 emotions to this conscious and noble end! We 
 are too hurried for this, a little too unbalanced be- 
 tween egotism and a sentimental humanitarian- 
 ism, a little too uncertain, despite much optimis- 
 tic brag, of any real and immediate values in 
 life. And so I repeat that we owe gratitude to 
 Pater for recalling us, if we will listen, to this lost 
 ideal. And there is much also to commend in the 
 method he proposes. If he teaches that the art of 
 life is to train our emotional nature, Hke a well- 
 trimmed lamp, to burn always with a hard, gem- 
 like flame, he also endlessly reiterates the lesson 
 that this joy of eager observation and swift re- 
 sponse can be made habitual in us only by a 
 severe self-discipline and moderation. Only when 
 the senses have been purified and sharpened by a 
 certain chastity of use, only when the mind has 
 been exercised by a certain rigidity of application, 
 do we become fit instruments to record the deli- 
 cate impacts of evanescent beauty. In his essay 
 on Raphael, one of the soundest of his critical 
 estimates, Pater refers to the saying that the true 
 artist is known best by what he omits; and this, 
 he adds, is "because the whole question of good 
 taste is involved precisely in such jealous omis- 
 sion." No one has seen more clearly than Pater 
 that virtue is not acquired by a rebound from 
 excess, but is the exquisite flower of the habit
 
 112 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 of moderation ; and in this sense the words that 
 he puts into the mouth of Raphael might be 
 appHed to himself: " I am utterly purposed that I 
 will not offend." 
 
 Yet withal the account with Pater cannot stop 
 here, nor, if we consider the fruit of his teaching 
 in such men as Oscar Wilde, can we admit that it 
 was altogether without offence. His error was not 
 that he inculcated the art of life at all seasons, but 
 that his sense of values was finally wrong; his 
 philosophy from beginning to end might be called 
 by a rhetorician a kind of hysteron-proteron. 
 And this was manifest in his attitude to the three 
 great moments of history. Thus in his interpreta- 
 tion of Plato we have seen how he falsified Plato's 
 theory and use of facts by raising beauty, or 
 sesthetic pleasure, above truth as the goal to be 
 kept in sight. Now this may seem a slight sin, 
 when in extolling the one nothing is intentionally 
 taken away from the honour of the other. Pater 
 would even say that as truth and beauty are the 
 same it makes no difference which of them you 
 set before your gaze; and in this he would have 
 the authority of many eminent predecessors. Are 
 we not all fond of quoting the great words of 
 Keats? — 
 
 " Beauty is truth, truth beauty," — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 
 
 Perhaps in some high philosophical realm that is
 
 WALTER PATER 113 
 
 the case; but it happens that in practice in this 
 mundane sphere the ways of truth and beauty 
 are by no means always identical, and it makes 
 a world of difference where you come out accord- 
 ing as you take this or the other for your guide. 
 I have been struck by a passage in one of the 
 recently published Japanese letters of Lafcadio 
 Hearn — certainly no foe to romantic beauty. 
 "They all [the romanticists] sowed a crop of 
 dragon's teeth," he says. "Preaching without 
 qualification the gospel of beauty — that beauty 
 is truth — provoked the horrible modern answer 
 of Zolaism: 'Then truth must be beauty!'" 
 Hearn was right : the sure end of this innocent- 
 seeming theory was decadence ; the inevitable fol- 
 lower of Pater was Oscar Wilde. In misinterpret- 
 ing Plato, Pater also misinterpreted life. 
 
 In like manner, when Pater in his treatment of 
 Christianity placed emotional satisfaction before 
 religious duty, he really missed the goal of happi- 
 ness he was aiming at. The old Scotch preacher 
 Blair pronounced the sure answer to such an er- 
 ror many years before Paterism existed : " To aim 
 at a constant succession of high and vivid sen- 
 sations of pleasure, is an idea of happiness al- 
 together chimerical. . . . Instead of those falla- 
 cious hopes of perpetual festivity, with which the 
 world would allure us, religion confers upon us a 
 cheerful tranquillity." Nor was Pater's fault in 
 regard to the Renaissance essentially different
 
 114 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 in its consequences; it may even be that here 
 where his temperament would seem to be most 
 at home, his subtle inversion of the facts, in mak- 
 ing beauty and pleasure the purpose of life instead 
 of holding them the reward or efflorescence of right 
 living, is the most instructive of all. Read Pater's 
 exquisitely refined pages on Leonardo da Vinci, 
 with their constant implication that beauty is a 
 kind of malady of the soul, and then recall the 
 strong young soul of the Renaissance as it speaks, 
 for instance, in the ringing lines of Chapman: 
 
 Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea 
 Loves t' have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind. . . . 
 There is no danger to a man that knows 
 What life and death is — 
 
 recall the whole magnificent passage, and you 
 will see why Pater's philosophy leads on inevit- 
 ably to weariness, and satiety, and impotence. 
 ij This exaltation of beauty above truth, and 
 I emotional grace above duty, and fine perception 
 above action, this insinuating hedonism which 
 would so bravely embrace the joy of the moment, 
 forgets to stay itself on any fixed principle outside 
 of itself, and, forgetting this, it somehow misses 
 the enduring joy of the world and empties life 
 pf^ true values. It springs, at least as we see 
 it manifest in these latter years, from the sense 
 of an exasperated personality submerged in the 
 ceaseless ebb and flow of things, and striving des- 
 perately to cHng to the shadows as they speed by
 
 WALTER PATER 115 
 
 and thus to win for itself an emotion of power and 
 I im portance. In Platonism and Christianity and, 
 to a certain extent, in the Renaissance, the beauty 
 and joy of the flux of nature were held subordin- 
 ate to an ideal above nature, the everlasting 
 Spirit that moves and is not moved. Because 
 Pater had lost from his soul this vision of the in- 
 finite, and sought to deify in its place the intense 
 realization of the flux itself as the end of life, for 
 that reason he failed to comprehend the inner 
 meaning of those great epochs, and became in- 
 stead one of the leaders of romantic aestheticism. 
 Thus it is that we cannot finally accept Pater's 
 philosophy of the art of life, notwithstanding all 
 that may be said in its favour; that even his 
 lesson of moderation and self-restraint, much as 
 that lesson is needed to-day and always, seems at 
 last to proceed from some deep-seated taint of 
 decaying vitality rather than from conscious 
 strength. So intimately are good and evil min- 
 gled together in human ideals.
 
 FIONA MACLEOD
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 
 
 The writer who concealed himself under the 
 name of Fiona Macleod has just been brought 
 into prominence by the publication of a complete 
 edition of his works and by an admirable 
 biography from the hand of his wife.^ He may 
 seem out of place among the greater forces of 
 romanticism, yet his position as one of the lead- 
 ers of revolt against certain aspects of our civiliz- 
 ation gives him some significance, and there is, 
 or at least was, a mystery about his double and 
 epicene personality which piques attention and 
 renders him curiously symbolical of the movement 
 he represented. For twelve years, until his death 
 in 1905 permitted the revelation, his identity with 
 the woman of the Highlands was kept secret by 
 the small circle to whom it was known. The sit- 
 uation had a comical element when William 
 Sharp, as chairman of the Stage Society, brought 
 out one of the plays of his supposed friend, Fiona 
 Macleod, at the Globe Theatre, and during the 
 rehearsals chatted with his Celtic fellows about 
 play and author. When the secret of Fiona's exist- 
 ence was ended there rose in its place the ques- 
 tion of Mr. Sharp's double activity — for all 
 
 • The Writings of " Fiona Macleod." Arranged by Mrs. William 
 Sharp. Seven volumes. New York: Duffield & Co. 1909-10. 
 
 William Sharp (Fiona Macleod) : A Memoir. Compiled by his Wife, 
 Elizabeth A. Sharp. New York: Duffield & Co. 1910.
 
 120 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 through the twelve years he had purposely con- 
 tinued his critical writing under his own name — 
 and certain amateur psychologists began to spread 
 the rumour of a mysterious dual personality in 
 the man, as if he had really possessed two souls, 
 one masculine and Saxon, the other feminine and 
 Gaelic. Mrs. Sharp, in her biography, rather 
 fosters this impression, and it is evident that 
 Sharp liked to puzzle himself and his friends by 
 the presumption of an extraordinary inspiration. 
 As a matter of fact there is nothing at all super- 
 natural or even very strange in the matter. The 
 wistful, ghostly vein that runs through the works 
 of Fiona Macleod was marked in William Sharp 
 from a child, and if most of his writing before he 
 assumed the Gaelic name shows the ordinary 
 qualities of Anglo-Saxon London, that was sim- 
 ply because he wrote for the market what the 
 market demanded. 
 
 William Sharp was born at Paisley in 1855, and 
 was in childhood very delicate. By his Highland 
 nurse, Barbara, he was initiated into the vague 
 legends and superstitions of the Gael, which later 
 were to form the speech of Fiona Macleod, and to 
 these he added the dreams and adventures of his 
 ^wn brooding, half-nurtured soul. Mrs. Sharp 
 tells of hearing him speak often of a gentle White 
 Lady of the Woods who appeared to him in his 
 childhood, and he himself in a letter wrote once of 
 this haunting vision, thus:
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 121 
 
 For I, too, have my dream, my memory of one whom 
 as a child I called Star-Eyes, and whom later I called 
 "Baumorair-na-mara," the Lady of the Sea, and whom 
 at last I knew to be no other than the woman who is in 
 the heart of women. I was not more than seven when 
 one day, by a well, near a sea-loch in Argyll, just as I 
 was stooping to drink, my glancing eyes lit on a tall 
 woman standing among a mist of wild hyacinths under 
 three great sycamores. I stood, looking, as a fawn looks, 
 wide-eyed, unafraid. She did not speak, but she smiled, 
 and because of the love and beauty in her eyes I ran to 
 her. She stooped and lifted blueness out of the flowers, 
 as one might lift foam out of a pool, and I thought she 
 threw it over me. When I was found lying among the 
 hyacinths dazed, and, as was thought, ill, I asked eagerly 
 after the lady in white, and with hair all shiny-gold like 
 buttercups, but when I found I was laughed at, or at 
 last, when I passionately persisted, was told I was sun- 
 dazed and had been dreaming, I said no more — but I 
 did not forget. 
 
 Pretty much all of Fiona Macleod's poetry 
 and philosophy is in that brief paragraph — the 
 synibolic vision that is impressive because it 
 really symboHzes nothing; the notion, that one 
 becomes spiritual by becoming abstract, as in 
 lifting blueness instead of something blue; the 
 half-conscious eroticism in the merging together 
 of nature and the woman who is in the heart of 
 women. There is no reason to suppose that some 
 dream of the kind did not actually visit the 
 delicate and lonely child, whose brain was filled 
 with the inarticulate stories of an old and wan- 
 dering superstition. In later years vacations
 
 122 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 passed in the western Highlands and on the 
 Hebridean islands reinforced his imagination 
 with the nature myths that still haunted those 
 remote and then almost untravelled places. He 
 evidently had unusual powers of sympathy which 
 unlocked the hearts of ancient women and Gaelic- 
 speaking fishermen, who, in the evenings before 
 the smouldering peat-fires or in herring-boats 
 on the mist-haunted seas, told him legends of 
 Pagan gods still secretly feared and loved amid 
 the practices and faith of Christianity, and of 
 the poets and seers who had strange kinship 
 with the forces of nature. 
 
 in particular he came to love the island of 
 lona, with its traditions of the great Columba 
 who had sailed thither from Ireland, bringing the 
 Gospel of Christ not as an enemy but as a friend 
 of the older religion. There he heard from a young 
 Hebridean priest and from others the prophecy of 
 the days when lona should once more be the 
 centre of a regenerating force which was to sweep 
 not over Scotland alone but over the world, de- 
 scending this time as "the Divine Womanhood 
 upon the human heart," and bringing the long- 
 desired consummation of peace. At times he 
 writes of this prophecy as if he accepted it almost 
 literally, though one suspects he was thinking 
 chiefly of the "great and deep spiritual change," 
 as he calls it, which the new school of Celtic 
 writers were to introduce into civilization by
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 123 
 
 their confessedly feminine use of the imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 On that island he also became acquainted with 
 an old fisherman, Seumas Macleod, who took the 
 child of seven on his knee one day and made him 
 pray to "Her," the spirit woman at the heart 
 of the world. Elsewhere he tells of coming once 
 as a boy of sixteen upon the old man at sunrise, 
 standing with his face to the sea and with his 
 bonnet removed from his long white locks. 
 When the boy spoke to Seumas (seeing he was 
 not "at his prayers"), the old man replied sim- 
 ply, in Gaelic, of course: "Every morning like 
 this I take my hat off to the beauty of the world." 
 It was, one suspects, the glancing light on the 
 waves and the wind-blown mists about lona, more 
 than the legendary lore of the spot, that affected 
 the boy. There is a story of a " man who went 
 [from lona] to the mainland, but could not see 
 to plough, because the brown fallows became 
 waves that splashed noisily about him. The same 
 man went to Canada, and got work in a great 
 warehouse ; but among the bales of merchandise 
 he heard the singular note of the sandpiper, and 
 every hour the sea-fowl confused him with their 
 crying." Something like that is the history of 
 William Sharp himself. 
 
 When the boy was twelve years old his parents 
 moved to Glasgow, and he was sent to the Acad- 
 emy in that city. In 1871 he was enrolled as a
 
 124 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 student at the Glasgow University, where he re- 
 mained for two years, leaving without taking a 
 degree. At this time, and indeed all through his 
 life, he had a voracious but unsystematic appe- 
 tite for books, for night after night reading "far 
 into the morning hours literature, philosophy, 
 poetry, mysticism, occultism, magic, mythology, 
 folk-lore." The result was to turn him from the 
 orthodox Presbyterianism, in which he had been 
 brought up, to a vague faith in some truth 
 glimpsed fitfully beneath all the creeds and cults 
 of religion. On leaving college he entered the 
 office of a firm of Glasgow lawyers. Here for two 
 years he is said to have allowed himself only four 
 hours out of the twenty-four for sleep, burning 
 away his strength, not on the law, it may be sup- 
 posed, but on more seductive studies. His health, 
 always precarious, broke under the strain, and 
 he was shipped off to Australia. The new world 
 did not satisfy him, and he was soon back in 
 Scotland, where he spent a year of idleness. In 
 1878 he came to London and took a place in a 
 bank; but literature still lured him, and after 
 a while he threw himself on his pen for support 
 and gradually, through many hardships and mo- 
 ments of despair, won for himself a profitable hold 
 on the publishers. Naturally, as a servant of the 
 press he wrote what the readers of magazines and 
 popular biographies desired, hiding close in his 
 heart the wayward mysticism and grandiose phil-
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 125 
 
 osophy he had learned from nature. Yet those 
 hidden springs of inspiration were never forgot- 
 ten, and in his intimate letters we hear continu- 
 ally of great projected epics and other poems 
 that were to solve the riddles of life. From the 
 specimens of these suppressed masterpieces given 
 by Mrs. Sharp in the biography, we conjecture 
 that their loss to the world is not deplorable. For 
 example : 
 
 There is in everything an undertone . . . 
 
 Those clear in soul are also clear in sight, 
 
 And recognise in a white cascade's flash, 
 
 The roar of mountain torrents, and the wail 
 
 Of multitudinous waves on barren sands. 
 
 The song of skylark at the flush of dawn, 
 
 A mayfield all ablaze with king-cups gold. 
 
 The clamour musical of culver wings 
 
 Beating the soft air of a dewy dusk, 
 
 The crescent moon far voyaging thro' dark skies, 
 
 And Sirius throbbing in the distant south, 
 
 A something deeper than mere audible 
 
 And visible sensations; for they see 
 
 Not only pulsings of the Master's breath, 
 
 The workings of inevitable Law, 
 
 But also the influences subordinate 
 
 And spirit actors in life's unseen side. 
 
 On e glint of nat ure_ma y unloc k a soul. 
 
 No doubt the youthful bard and his confidante 
 thought he was uttering some startling spiritual 
 truth and, as is the way with youthful bards and 
 their accomplices, cursed the world for its obsti- 
 fnate deafness. As a matter of fact that sort of 
 pantheistic revery was exasperatingly easy then,
 
 126 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 jWnd now; Wordsworth and Shelley and a little 
 I (contempt for reason are the formula responsible 
 [for a stream of that kind of thing that trickles 
 I [clammily through the nineteenth century. For 
 whatever solid basis there is in the work of Fiona 
 Macleod we must thank the hard prosaic experi- 
 ence of William Sharp, which gave him some dis- 
 cipline in common sense and kept his aspirations 
 in long abeyance. 
 
 Two friendships in these early years should 
 not be forgotten. As a boy he had fallen in 
 love with his cousin Elizabeth, and, after years 
 of waiting and despite some family opposition, 
 they were married. If she was not precisely the 
 muse of Fiona Macleod, for that honour belongs 
 to an unnamed woman with whom he became 
 acquainted later in life, she cherished his am- 
 bitions and responded sympathetically to his 
 dreams of a Celtic revival. Another friend, who' 
 influenced him profoundly, was the figure that 
 looms so large in all the literary history of the 
 day, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then a broken man 
 secluding himself in the stealthy, heavy-aired re- 
 treat he had made for himself at i6, Cheyne 
 Walk, but still the deus prcesens in the imag- 
 inative world in which Swinburne and Watts- 
 Dunton and Walter Pater and Philip Bourke 
 Marston and other scented souls were breathing 
 dim or gorgeous hopes. The first book that 
 brought general recognition to Sharp was his
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 127 
 
 study of Rossetti, and years afterwards, in a 
 dedication to Walter Pater of a projected new 
 edition, which, however, he never finished, he 
 expressed what Rossetti meant to them: 
 
 / \^e are all seeking a lost Eden. This ideal Beauty 
 
 that we catch gRmpses of, now in morning loveliness, 
 
 now in gloohis of tragic terror, haunts us by day and 
 
 night, in dreams of waking and sleeping — nay, whether 
 
 or not we will, among the littlenesses and exigences of 
 
 . our diurnal affairs. It may be that, driven from the 
 
 ' Eden of direct experience, we are being more and more 
 
 forced into taking refuge within the haven guarded by 
 
 our dreams. To a few only is it given to translate, with 
 
 rare distinction and excellence, something of this mani- 
 
 : fold m essage of Eeauty^ — though all of us would fain be, 
 
 with your Marius, "of the number of those who must be 
 
 ' made perfect by the love of visible beauty." Among 
 
 [ these few, in latter years in this country, no one has 
 
 ; wrought more exquisitely for us than Rossetti. 
 
 The dominance of Rossetti's vision of artificial 
 beauty must not be forgotten when we read the 
 works of Fiona Macleod. 
 
 By the year 1892, when Sharp was thirty-seven, 
 he was in a position to command his own time to 
 a certain extent, and with his wife he settled 
 down for a while in a little cottage at Rudgwick, 
 Sussex. His first ambition was to edit a maga- 
 zine which should be unhampered by any policy 
 save his own whims and ambitions, and he actu- 
 ally wrote and printed one issue of the Pagan Re- 
 view. Fortunately he carried that fantastic pro-
 
 128 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 ject no further. Then came the inspiration of 
 Fiona Macleod. He himself in a letter to Mrs. 
 Thomas Janvier, who was one of the few in the 
 secret, explained why he assumed this disguised 
 personality : 
 
 I can write out of my heart in a way I could not do as 
 William Sharp, and indeed I could not do so if I were the 
 woman Fiona Macleod is supposed to be, unless veiled 
 in scrupulous anonymity. . . . 
 
 This rapt sense of oneness with nature, this cosmic 
 ecstasy and elation, this wayfaring along the extreme 
 verges of the common world, all this is so wrought up 
 with the romance of life that I could not bring myself to 
 expression by my outer self, insistent and tyrannical as 
 that need is. . . . My truest self, the self who is below all 
 other selves, and my most intimate life and joys and 
 sufferings, thoughts, emotions and dreams, must find 
 expression, yet I cannot save in this hidden way. 
 
 There is, as I have said before, not quite so 
 much mystery in this whole proceeding as Mr. 
 Sharp and some of his friends would have us be- 
 lieve — the mystery in fact is mainly of that sort 
 of mystification which has pleased so many other 
 romantic writers, and which has its roots in the 
 rather naive desire to pose as the prophetic in- 
 strument of some vast renovation of ideas, when 
 really the prophet's mind, instead of labouring 
 with ideas, is floating in a shoreless sea of rev- 
 ery and tossing with indistinguishable emotions. 
 Nor is it at all strange that Sharp should have 
 taken a woman's name. He had for one thing
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 129 
 
 the Inspiration of his lately found friend in Rome, 
 of whom we get only tantalizing glimpses in the 
 biography and in his dedications — the woman 
 who stood to him as the personification of the 
 Anima Celtica, the Celtic Soul still brooding, as 
 he describes it, in the "Land of Promise whose 
 borders shine with the loveliness of all for- 
 feited, or lost, or banished dreams and realities 
 of Beauty." Moreover, the feminine element, 
 the Ewig-Weibliche, has always been prominent 
 in_ the ideals o f romantic Schwdrmerei, and it 
 was natural that this latest incarnation of the 
 old hopes and visions should have appeared in 
 the guise of a feminine form. The particular 
 name is easily accounted for. The two strongest 
 impressions seem to have been made on the boy 
 by the island of lona and the old man Macleod ; 
 Fiona is the nearest girl's appellation to lona, 
 and so the name is made. The earliest book to 
 appear under the new signature was Pharais, 
 published in 1894; The Mountain Lovers, which 
 with Pharais forms the first volume of the col- 
 lected works, came out in 1895, and thereafter, 
 for the ten remaining years of Sharp's life, there 
 was a succession of stories, sketches, essays, 
 poems, and dramas, making in the complete edi- 
 tion seven fair-sized volumes. Pharais caught 
 the attention of the discerning at once, and the 
 interest in the unknown writer never flagged. 
 She became a cult with some, and with others a
 
 130 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 recurring escape from the world and from 
 thought. 
 
 With advancing years t he restlessness that from 
 childhood had been characteristic of Sharp's tem- 
 perament grew to what can only be described as 
 feverish excess. The first glimpse we have of him 
 as a baby is in the form of a runaway storming 
 a make-believe castle in fairy-land, and at the 
 end, until held in the leash by ill-health, we see 
 him still drifting, or rather running, from place 
 to place, seeking febrile exhilaration from the 
 sea or unearthly peace from the hills, always in 
 pa^jivild haste to overtake some vanishing impal- 
 I pable goal of the heart's desire. He who boasted 
 1 vaUantly that his soul knew its home in nature 
 I was, like so many of his tribe, a victim in fact of 
 L-an incurable nostalgia. He died in Sicily in 1905, 
 beloved and regretted. Over his grave an lona 
 cross was raised, and on it were cut the inscrip- 
 tions chosen by himself: 
 
 Farewell to the known and exhausted, 
 Welcome the unknown and illimitable — 
 
 and 
 
 Love is more great than we conceive, and Death is the 
 keeper of unknown redemptions. 
 
 I cannot at all agree with Mr. Sharp's esti- 
 mates of the works of Fiona Macleod. He appar- 
 ently valued most the later writings in which the 
 human motives disappear in a haze of disorgan- 
 ized symbolism, whereas the normal reader is
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 131 
 
 likely to find his interest centring, with some mi- 
 nor exceptions, in the tales of Pharais and The 
 Mountain Lovers. In these the discipHne Sharp 
 had acquired from long apprenticeship to the 
 press kept him within the bounds of reason, while 
 the new freedom and the Celtic imagery added a 
 note of strange and fascinating beauty. There is 
 more of passion in The Mountain Lovers; the 
 scenes about the lonely haunted pool, the terrible 
 unrelenting love and madness of the blind old 
 man, the elfish fear and wisdom of the dwarf, 
 the yearning of the girl Oona that a soul may be 
 born in her wild worshipper — the whole tissue 
 of emotions in this solitude where the influences 
 of forgotten gods are more numerous than the 
 human beings, has the sombreness and awe of 
 real tragedy. But on the whole Pharais, with its 
 quieter beauty and subtler pathos, seems to me 
 the more memorable work; Fiona Macleod never 
 equalled that first lovely creation. The story of 
 Pharais, briefly stated, is of a fair young woman 
 on one of the lonely outer isles; of her husband 
 upon whom the mind-dark, that is to say the 
 clouding forgetfulness of melancholy, has fallen; 
 and of their child who is born to them blind. The 
 elements of the tale may sound depressingly 
 gloomy, but in fact they are so lost in brave 
 human sympathies, so mingled with the sym- 
 bolic sadness of the winds and especially of the 
 infinite voices of the encompassing sea, that the
 
 132 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 effect is not depression but the elevation of the 
 finer romantic art. When the little child is buried, 
 and the mourners return home, the voices are 
 filled with tragic lamentation: 
 
 . . . The island lay in a white shroud. At the extreme 
 margin, a black, pulsating line seemed to move sinu- 
 ously from left to right. 
 
 Suddenly a deeper sound boomed from the sea, 
 though no wind ruffled the drifts which already lay thick 
 in the hollows. Till midnight, and for an hour beyond, 
 this voice of the sea was as the baying of a monstrous 
 hound. 
 
 None in the homestead slept. The silence, broken 
 only by that strange, menacing baying of the waves as 
 they roamed through the solitudes environing the isle, 
 was so intense that sometimes the ears echoed as with 
 the noise of a rush of wings, or as with the sonorous sus- 
 pensions between the striking of bell and bell in monot- 
 onously swung chimes. 
 
 Then again, suddenly, and still without the coming of 
 wind, the sea ceased its hoarse, angry baying, and, after 
 lapse within lapse till its chime was almost inaudible, 
 gave forth in a solemn dirge the majestic music of its 
 inmost heart. 
 
 And at the last, when the husband carries the 
 lifeless burden of his wife out into the white 
 shroud of the new-fallen snow, and, for a mo- 
 ment recovering his reason, knows his loss and 
 the mystery of life, the human emotions are 
 again involved in the vision and sound of the sea: 
 
 Idly he watched a small, grey snow-cloud passing low 
 above the island.
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 133 
 
 A warm breath reached the heart of it, and set the 
 myriad wings astir. Down, straight down above the isle 
 and for a few fathoms beyond it, they fluttered waver- 
 ingly. 
 
 The fall was like a veil suspended over Ithona: a veil 
 so thin, so transparent, that the sky was visible through 
 it as an azure dusk; and beneath it, the sea as a blue- 
 flowing lawn whereover its skirts trailed; while behind 
 it, the rising sunfire was a shimmer of amber-yellow that 
 made every falling flake glisten like burnished gold. . . . 
 
 The sea lay breathing in a deep calm all around the 
 isle. But, from its heart that never slumbers, rose as of 
 yore, and for ever, a rumour as of muffled prophesyings, 
 a Voice of Awe, a Voice of Dread. 
 
 Having found his public in these two tales, Mr. 
 Sharp, I think, a little abused its good-nature. A 
 few of the shorter stories have a weird beauty not 
 without some relation to human experience, and 
 some of the nature-essays, written at the very 
 end of his life and brought together under the 
 title of Where the Forest Murmurs, display an in- 
 timate union of symbolism and real observation 
 such as many in these latter days have attempted 
 but few have achieved. He never, for instance, 
 did anything better in its way than The Hill Tarn, 
 which tells how an old gillie climbed one mid- 
 winter day to a solitary pool in the mountains, 
 and what strange sight there met his eyes: 
 
 . . . He started before dawn, but did not reach the 
 lochan till a red fire of sunset flared along the crests. 
 The tarn was frozen deep, and for all the pale light that 
 dwelled upon it was black as basalt, for a noon-tempest
 
 134 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 had swept its surface clear of snow. At first he thought 
 small motionless icebergs lay in it, but wondered at their 
 symmetrical circle. He descended as far as he dared, 
 and saw that seven wild-swans were frozen on the tarn's 
 face. They had alit there to rest, no doubt: but a fierce 
 cold had numbed them, and an intense frost of death had 
 suddenly transfixed each as they swam slowly circlewise 
 as is their wont. They may have been there for days, 
 perhaps for weeks. A month later the gillie repeated his 
 arduous and dangerous feat. They were still there, 
 motionless, ready for flight as it seemed. 
 
 How often in thought I have seen that coronal of 
 white swans above the dark face of that far, solitary 
 tarn: in how many dreams I have listened to the rustle 
 of unloosening wings, and seen seven white phantoms 
 rise cloud-like, and like clouds at night drift swiftly into 
 the dark; and heard, as mournful bells through the soli- 
 tudes of sleep, the honk-honk of the wild-swans travers- 
 ing the obscure forgotten ways to the secret country 
 beyond sleep and dreams and silence. 
 
 Take away the conventional inanity of that 
 last phrase and you have here a passage which 
 contains an image at once rare and actual and in 
 itself suggestive of the most romantic interpre- 
 tation. If Mr. Sharp had written always, or even 
 often, in that vein, he would have accomplished 
 something memorable and large in English let- 
 ters; but too frequently .the symbolism riins 
 .c|uite away with him and leaves one vaguely 
 -Wondering whether he really had anything in 
 --bis mind to symbolize. Many of the old Gaelic 
 traditions and legends which he has attempted 
 to revivify strike one in his rendering as mere
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 135 
 
 empty vapouring. Though he never united him- 
 self unreservedly with the so-called Celtic move- 
 ment and deprecated its too common hostility 
 to prosaic sense and to everything Saxon, even 
 bringing upon himself the obsecrations of some 
 of the fiercer enthusiasts, yet in his inability to 
 distinguish between an idea or even a genuine 
 emotion and the fluttering of tired nerves he fell 
 again and again into meaningless rhetoric that 
 makes the loosest vapourings of "A. E." or Mr. 
 W. B. Yeats seem solid and compact of reason. 
 His two plays based on old Irish legends are 
 frankly in the school of the so-called Psychic 
 Drama, which is the ambition of many young 
 writers for the stage in other countries as well 
 as in Ireland. The ultimate aim of this theatre 
 de I'dme, he says in the introduction to one of 
 these plays, is " to express the passion of remorse 
 under the signal of a Voice lamenting, or the 
 passion of tears under the signal of a Cry, and 
 be content to give no name to these protagon- 
 ists." He has not, indeed, gone quite to this ex- 
 treme of inanity in his actual production, but 
 he has gone far enough to empty his characters of 
 all individuality, and in making them the mere 
 mouthpieces of the vaguest bubbles of revery has 
 left them passionless nonentities. Compare his 
 work in this kind with that of Mr. Synge, who 
 died just recently. Mr. Synge had too much feel- 
 ing for his audience and too strong a grasp on
 
 136 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 personal emotion to lose himself utterly in this 
 shadow- world, and his characters, ior all his 
 Celtic twilight, have some of the blood of real 
 Jife in theni. The simple fact is that Mr. Sharp, 
 having got the trick of this sort of symbolic writ- 
 ing, found it dehghtfully easy and indulged in 
 it without restraint. Possibly he deceived him- 
 self into believing that to write without thought 
 is to write with inspiration; in reality he was 
 abusing an outworn convention. Take a stanza 
 of his poems — almost any stanza will do : 
 
 Oh, fair immaculate rose of the world, rose of my dream, 
 my Rose! 
 
 Beyond the ultimate gates of dream I have heard thy mys- 
 tical call: 
 
 It is where the rainbow of hope suspends and the river of 
 rapture flows — 
 
 And the cool sweet dews from the wells of peace for ever 
 fall. 
 
 Now it is quite possible that these phrases — 
 "rose of my dream," "ultimate gates of dream," 
 "rainbow of hope," "river of rapture," "wells of 
 peace" — it is quite possible that these phrases 
 when first struck out corresponded to some 
 yearning for an ideal clearly conceived and 
 strongly imaged, but as they are used and end- 
 lessly reiterated by Mr. Sharp, and by others of 
 his school, they become a pure poetic convention 
 emptier of specific content than the much-abused 
 cliches of the pseudo-classical poets. They require 
 no effort on the part of the poet, and convey no
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 137 
 
 shock of meaning to the reader. You remember 
 the Grand Academy of Lagado which was once 
 visited by a certain Mr. GulHver, and the pleas- 
 ant device of the academicians to produce htera- 
 ture without waste of brain. Well, something 
 like that might seem to be the method employed 
 in turning out a good deal of this late romantic 
 prose and verse. All you need do is to have a 
 frame of shifting blocks on which are inscribed 
 severally the conventional phrases, and then by 
 the turn of a crank to throw them into new com- 
 binations, and, presto, the thing is done. Dr. 
 Johnson said the last word on this sort of com- 
 position when he demolished Ossian: "Sir, a man 
 might write such stuff for ever, if he would aban- 
 don his mind to it." 
 
 In fact there is in all this literature a double 
 misunderstanding, as must be pretty clear from 
 what has been already said about it. Sharp and 
 those who were working with him believed that 
 they were faithfully renewing the old Celtic ideal- 
 ism, and they believed also that in this revival 
 there was the prophecy of a great spiritual and 
 imaginative renovation for the world; whereas 
 in simple truth their inspiration came essentially 
 from a source that had nothing to do with any 
 special character of the Celts, and so far from 
 being heralds of youth they are the fag end of a 
 movement that shows every sign of expiring. 
 Now it is well not to exaggerate on either side.
 
 138 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Something of the ancient Celtic imagination has 
 undoubtedly been caught up by these young en- 
 thusiasts. There is to begin with in the writings 
 of Fiona Macleod a good deal of the actual 
 legendary matter, taken in part from written 
 records and in part from the fragmentary and 
 fast-disappearing tradition among the Gaelic- 
 speaking people of the Highlands and the West- 
 ern Islands. The mere use of the names and 
 myths of a time is likely to carry with it some- 
 thing of the emotional content that has become 
 associated with them. The new and the old 
 schools of the Celt have thus certain traits in com- 
 mon — the sense of fateful brooding, the feeling 
 of dark and bright powers concealed in nature 
 and working mysteriously upon human destiny, 
 the conception of passions as forces that have 
 a strange life in themselves and come into the 
 breasts of men as if they were ghostly visitants, 
 the craving for unearthly but very real beauty, 
 the haunting belief in a supernatural world that 
 lies now far away in the unattainable West, and 
 now buried beneath our feet or just trembling into 
 vision, the mixture of fear and yearning towards 
 that world as a source of incalculable joys or dark 
 forgetful madness to those who break in upon its 
 secret reserve. All these things, more or less ex- 
 plicit, you will find in the saga literature of Ire- 
 land as it has been paraphrased by Lady Gregory 
 in her Cuchulain of Muirthemne or translated
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 139 
 
 more literally by Miss Hull and other scholars; 
 and you will find them in the books of Fiona 
 Macleod and Mr. Yeats. But withal the essen- 
 tial spirit of the sagas is quite different from that 
 of these imitators — as different as tremendous 
 action is frorn,..slckly_brQQdin^, The light in the 
 old tales is hard and sharp and brilliant, whereas 
 our modern writers rather like to merge the out- 
 lines of nature in an all-obliterating grey. The 
 heroes in the sagas are men and women that 
 throb with insatiable life, and their emotions, 
 whatever mysticism may lie in the background, 
 are the stark, mortal passions of love and greed 
 and hatred and revenge and lamentable grief; 
 whereas it is the creed of the newer school, fortu- 
 nately not always followed, to create a literature, 
 which, instead of dealing with the clashing wills 
 of men, shall, in the words of Fiona Macleod, 
 offer "the subtlest and most searching means 
 for the imagination to compel reality to dreams, 
 to compel actuality to vision, to compel to the 
 symbolic congregation of words the bewildering 
 throng of wandering and illusive thoughts and 
 ideas." What Fiona Macleod meant by this 
 "theatre of the soul" can be made clear by a 
 single comparison. There is in the book of Lady 
 Gregory a version of the Fate of the Sons of 
 Usnach, being an account of the marvellous love- 
 liness of Deirdre and of the ruin it wrought, 
 which, in spite of some incoherence, is one of
 
 140 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 the unforgettable stories of the world. When 
 Deirdre is born a Druid comes to the house, 
 and sees the child, and utters this vision of the 
 future: 
 
 O Deirdre, on whose account many shall weep, on 
 whose account many women shall be envious, there will 
 be trouble on Ulster for your sake, O fair daughter of 
 Fedlimid. 
 
 Many will be jealous of your face, O flame of beauty; 
 for your sake heroes shall go to exile. For your sake 
 deeds of anger shall be done in Emain; there is harm in 
 your face, for it will bring banishment and death on the 
 sons of kings. ... 
 
 You will have a litde grave apart to yourself; you will 
 be a tale of wonder for ever, Deirdre. 
 
 Now Mr. Sharp has adopted the story of The 
 House of Usna for his theatre of the soul, and this 
 is what he has to say in a song of Deirdre: 
 
 Dim face of Beauty haunting all the world. 
 
 Fair face of Beauty all too fair to see. 
 
 Where the lost stars adown the heavens are hurled^ 
 
 There, there alone for thee 
 
 May white peace be. 
 
 For here, where all the dreams of men are whirled 
 Like sere, torn leaves of autumn to and fro. 
 There is no place for thee in all the world, 
 
 Who drifted as a star. 
 
 Beyond, afar. 
 
 Between the very woman Deirdre of the saga 
 and this "dim face of Beauty" a whole civiliza- 
 tion has passed; the force that is moving Fiona
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 141 
 
 Macleod Is in its essential quality not from the 
 Celt or Gael, but, as the phrase adopted by her 
 implies, from the thedtre de Vdme of Maeterlinck, 
 and far behind him from the whole romantic 
 movement of Europe. We have seen the earlier 
 grandiose schemes of William Sharp melted 
 down in practice to a commonplace imitation of 
 Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats ; these later 
 productions of Fiona Macleod, though they show 
 more literary skill and take much of their gla- 
 mour from reminiscences of Celtic legend, are es- 
 sentially drawn from the same failing well from 
 which in its abundance those poets drew their 
 sturdier dreams of pantheism. Here is the twilight 
 and not the dawn of a great movement. 
 
 I have not made myself understood if I have 
 conveyed the idea that there is nothing of loveli- 
 ness in this late manifestation of romanticism. 
 And I know well its plea of justification, -^elaxa- 
 t;ion, one says, has its place as well as strenuous 
 iai^ntion. It Is wholesome at times to withdraw 
 from the struggle of existence and wander by the 
 lonely -shores, where the sharpness of life's out- 
 lines is blurred by floating mists, and the voices 
 of the world are lost in the lisp and clamour of 
 the tides; where the hard sense of our individual 
 personality dissolves into the flux of vague im- 
 personal forces, and the difficulties of thought 
 and the pangs of unattained desire are soothed 
 "tnto inconsequential revery. Especially when
 
 142 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 the heart is fatigued by the harsh intrusions of 
 ^ence and a scientific philosophy it is good to 
 seek refuge in surrender to an impressionism that 
 acknowledges no law of control. I would not 
 even say that this opposition to science — and at 
 bottom modern romance is an attempt to escape 
 [from the circle of scientific necessity — has no 
 specious argument on its side. For, after all, if 
 we must interpret nature in terms of human 
 comprehension, why have not the emotions as 
 good a right as reason to dictate the symbols of 
 the formula? If Sir George Darwin is justified in 
 elaborating a mathematical equation which shall 
 express the action of the tides in the pure lan- 
 guage of man's intellect, why may not the ro- 
 mantic poet express them in the speech of pure 
 emotion? In the one case we are enabled to pre- 
 dict the recurrence of phenomena and so to en- 
 large the sphere of rational life; in the other case 
 we add new realms to our emotional life. In 
 either case we are^dfialing with symbols only and 
 are brought not one step nearer to a realization 
 of the sheer fact of nature; nor is it easy to see 
 how one set of symbols has more reality in its 
 influence on conduct and practice than the other. 
 The fault of this pantheistic romance, in truth, 
 lies not in its opposition to science, but in the 
 illusory character of that opposition, and in its 
 inability at the last to lift the imagination out of.- 
 the very field in which science also moves. They
 
 FIONA MACLEOD 143 
 
 are both th e children of naturalism , and grew up 
 together. There are gleams of magic beauty in 
 this romance Llhere is.ajTiomentary rdief flin^- 
 ^^S_21^e's self from the purely intellectual absorp- 
 tion in nature to the purely emotional, from ra- 
 tionalism to revery; but the change is no more 
 than a change in attitude towards the same mas- 
 ter, and the desired liberation is not here. Rather, 
 as the divergence between science and romance is 
 widened, the bounds within which they are both 
 confined press more harshly upon the imagina- 
 tion, and the mind, vacillating restlessly from one 
 extreme to the other, ends in a state of futile irri- 
 tatipji. These glimpses of illusory beauty and this 
 offei^of freedom leave us in the end a more help- 
 less prey of the unlovely tyranny from which we 
 thought to escape.
 
 NIETZSCHE
 
 NIETZSCHE 
 
 If the number of books written about a sub- 
 ject is any proof of interest in it, Nietzsche must 
 have become one of the most popular of authors 
 among Englishmen and Americans. Besides the 
 authorized version of his Works appearing under 
 the editorial care of Dr. Levy,^ every season for 
 the past three or four years has brought at least 
 one new interpretation of his theories or bio- 
 graphy of the man. Virtually all of these books 
 are composed by professed and uncritical ad- 
 mirers, but we can, nevertheless, see the figure 
 of Nietzsche beginning to stand out in its true 
 character. He was not quite the Galahad of 
 philosophy that he appeared to his sister,^ yet 
 neither was he the monster of immorality which 
 frightened us when first his theories began to 
 be bruited abroad. The stern, calculating Super- 
 man turns out on inspection to be a creature of 
 quivering nerves and of extreme sensitiveness to 
 the opinion of his fellows, though with a vein 
 of dauntless resolution through it all. 
 
 1 The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The first complete and 
 authorized English translation. Edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. London: 
 T. N. Foulis; New York: The Macmillan Co. i8 volumes. 
 
 ' Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's. Von Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. 
 Leipzig. 1895, 1897, 1904. — The best biography in English is The Life 
 of Friedrich Nietzsche, by Daniel Halevy; translated [from the French] by 
 J. M. Hone. New York: The Macmillaa Co. 1911. .
 
 ^ 
 
 148 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, to give his full 
 baptismal name, was born in the little village of 
 Rocken, October jl5j_2.844. His father, a Luth- 
 eran clergyman of scholarly and musical tastes, 
 suffered a severe fall when the child was four 
 years old, and died after a short period of mental 
 aberration. In 1850 the widow went with her 
 son and her daughter Elisabeth to live with her 
 husband's mother and sister in Naumburg-an- 
 der-Saale. There Friedrich grew to be a solemn, 
 thoughtful boy, nicknamed by his comrades 
 " the little pastor." With his sister and one or 
 two friends he raised about himself a fantastic 
 world of the imagination, in which he played 
 many heroic roles. Yet always he felt himself 
 alone and set apart. "From childhood," he 
 wrote in his boyish journal, " I sought solitude, 
 and found my happiness there where undis- 
 turbed I could retire into myself." 
 
 At the age of fourteen he received a scholar- 
 ship at the school of Pforta, situated on the Saale 
 about five miles from Naumburg. In this clois- 
 tered institution, where the ancient discipline of 
 the Cistercian founders still prevailed over its 
 Protestant curriculum, Nietzsche acquired that 
 jthorough grounding in the classics which served 
 jhim later in his philological studies, and for a 
 /while he felt in his heart the influence of the re- 
 ligious, almost monastic, life. But the spirit of 
 weariness and rebellion soon supervened. "The
 
 NIETZSCHE 149 
 
 existence of God," he wrote in an exercise for a 
 literary society, "immortality, the authority of 
 the Bible, Revelation, and the like, will forever 
 remain problems. I_have attempted to deny 
 everything: ah, to destroy is easy, but to build 
 up!" And further: "Very often submission to the 
 will of God and humility are but a covering man- 
 tle for cowardly reluctance to face our destiny 
 with determination." — So early was the boy 
 preluding to the life-work of the man. 
 
 At Pforta, Nietzsche had become intimate 
 with Paul Deussen (afterwards the eminent Ori- 
 ental scholar and disciple of Schopenhauer), and 
 with Deussen and another friend he began his 
 university career at Bonn. But from his com- 
 rades there he soon fled, "like a fugitive," he says, 
 and went to Leipzig. Here he came under the 
 influence that was to shape his whole literary ca- 
 reer. Chancing one day at a bookshop on a copy 
 of The World as Will and Representation, he 
 heard as it were a daemon whispering in his ear : 
 "Take the book home with you." This was his 
 Tolle, lege ; the message had found him. Rebel as 
 he might in later years against Schopenhauer's 
 pessimistic doctrine of blind, unmeaning will; 
 try as he might to construct a positive doctrine 
 out of that blank negation, he never got the 
 poison out of his blood. Much of the pose and 
 lyric misanthropy of Zarathustra is really an 
 echo of what he read in his room on that fateful
 
 150 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 day. It is probable, too, that his careful use of 
 language is partly due to the influence of Scho- 
 penhauer. In Leipzig also he met the man who 
 was to be the great joy and the great torment of 
 his life. One memorable evening, at the house 
 of a friend, he was introduced to Wagner, heard 
 him play from the Meister singer, and learnt that 
 the "musician of the future" was a disciple of 
 Schopenhauer. 
 
 Meanwhile he had not neglected his classical 
 studies and had already published several phil- 
 ological essays in the Rheinisches Museum. In 
 1869, through the recommendation of his master 
 and friend, Ritschl, he was appointed Professor 
 of Philology in the University of Basle, and took 
 up his residence in the Swiss town, not without 
 misgivings over his youth and his unfitness for 
 the routine of teaching. Nevertheless, he threw 
 himself into the task with zeal and was, in the be- 
 ginning at least, highly successful with the stu- 
 dents. 
 
 At that time Richard and Cosima Wagner 
 were living in seclusion at Triebschen on the lake 
 of the Four Cantons, not far from Lucerne, while 
 the master was completing his great tetralogy. 
 Here Nietzsche renewed the acquaintance which 
 had been begun at Leipzig, and was soon deeply 
 absorbed in Wagner's ideas and ambitions. "I 
 have found a man," he wrote in a letter after his 
 first visit to Triebschen, "who more than any
 
 NIETZSCHE 15X 
 
 other reveals to me the image of what Schopen- 
 hauer calls 'geniuSi' and who is quite penetrated 
 with that wonderful, fervent philosophy. .-^.-No 
 qn^Jcnows him and can judge him, because all 
 the world stands on another basis and is not at 
 homein his atmosphere. In him rules an ideal- 
 ity so absolute, a humanity so profound and 
 moving, an earnestness of life so exalted, that in 
 his presence Ifeel myself as in the presence of 
 the divine." Under the sway of this admiration 
 Nietzsche wrote and published his first book, 
 The Birth of Tragedy, in which he broke lance 
 with the pedantic routine of philology as then 
 taught in the universities, and held up the Wag- 
 nerian ojDera as a reincarnation of the spirit of 
 Greek tragedy and as the art of the future. "Any- 
 thing more beautiful than your book I have never 
 read! all is noble!" was the comment of the com- 
 plaisant master. Nietzsche always maintained 
 that those were the happiest days of his life; for 
 a little while he was excited out of imprisoning 
 egotism and caught up into another egotism 
 greater than his own. ^But the cause of his happi- 
 ness was also the cause of its instability. No 
 doubt the scandalous rupture between the two 
 friends was due in part to philosophical differ- 
 ences, for in the Wagnerian opera Nietzsche 
 came later to see all the elements of romantic 
 idealism which were most abhorrent to him. But 
 deeper yet lay the inevitable necessity that two
 
 152 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 personalities, each of which sought to absorb the 
 world into itself, should separate with fire and 
 thunder. In his last days Nietzsche insinuated 
 that there had been love between him and Cos- 
 ima, but this was no doubt a delusion of madness. 
 The friendship and quarrel are easily explained 
 as a tragic and humorous incident of romanti- 
 cism. 
 
 But to return to Basle. The routine of univer- 
 sity life soon became irksome to Nietzsche. He 
 felt within him the stirring of a new philosophy, 
 to develop which he needed leisure and inde- 
 pendence. His health, too, began to alarm him. 
 In one of the recesses of his Leipzig years he had 
 been drafted into a Prussian regiment of artillery, 
 despite his exemption due to short sight, and had 
 served reluctantly but faithfully, until released on 
 account of an injury caused by falling from his 
 horse. His strength was never the same after 
 that, though the seat of his disease was deeper 
 than any accidental hurt. Especially at Basle 
 he began to suffer severely from insomnia and 
 various nervous ailments, and at last, in 1879, 
 he broke his connection with the university, and 
 went out into the world to seek health and to 
 publish his new gospel. 
 
 For a while he lived with his sister, and pro- 
 jected with her great schemes for a kind of monas- 
 tic seminary, wherein a few noble spirits, dissatis- 
 fied with the world and, needless to add, devoted
 
 NIETZSCHE 153 
 
 to himself, should dwell together and from their 
 studious seclusion pour out a stream of philosophy 
 to regenerate society. After his sister left him — 
 they parted not on the best of terms — he passed 
 his time in Italy and Switzerland. He was always 
 a lover of the mountains, and especially in the 
 pure air of the Engadine he found temporary re- 
 lief for the ills of the body and refreshment of 
 spirit after contact with unsympathetic man- 
 kind. He walked much, and his later books — 
 with the exception of Zarathustra, which pos- 
 sesses some thread of composition — are not 
 much more than miscellaneous collections of 
 pensees jotted down as they came to him by the 
 way. A flattering portrait of him in these lone- 
 lier years was drawn by his enthusiastic disciple, 
 Madame Meta von Salis-Marschlins, in her Philo- 
 soph und Edelniensch. Not all was yet cloud and 
 gloom about his brooding soul, and the Superman 
 was still capable of gay comradeship and of the 
 most approved German revery over the beauties 
 of nature. His conversation, when he felt at ease, 
 was copious and brilliant. But he was slipping 
 more and more into bitter, self-consuming soli- 
 tude. " I have forty-three years behind me," he 
 wrote one day, "and am as alone as if I were a 
 child." 
 
 The end was unrelieved darkness. With the 
 neglect or vilification of his books, with the alien- 
 ation of one friend after another, and with the
 
 154 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 growth of the taint in his blood, his self-absorp- 
 tion developed into fitful illusions and downright 
 megalomania. His last work he called Ecce Homo, 
 and to Brandes, the well-known critic, he 
 wrote : — 
 
 Friend George, — Since you have discovered me, it 
 is not wonderful to find me: what is now difficult is to 
 lose me. 
 
 The Crucified. 
 
 After lingering some time in imbecility under the 
 care of his sister at Weimar, he died on the 25th 
 of August, 1900. 
 
 One may begin the perusal of the life of 
 Nietzsche with a feeling of repulsion for the man, 
 — at least that, I confess, was my own experi- 
 ence, — but one can scarcely lay it down without 
 pity for his tragic failures, and without something 
 like admiration for his reckless devotion to ideas. 
 And all through the reading one is impressed by 
 the truth which his ardent worshipper, Madame 
 von Salis-Marschlins, has made the keynote of 
 her characterization: "He — and this is the 
 ■ salient point — condemned a whole class of feel- 
 \ ings in their excess, not because he did not have 
 them, but just because he did have them and 
 . knew their danger." That truth is as important 
 for judging the man as for understanding his 
 philosophy. He was a man terribly at war with 
 .himself, and in this very breach in his nature lies 
 the attraction — powerfully felt but not always
 
 NIETZSCHE 155 
 
 clearly understood — of his works for the mod- 
 ern world. No doubt, if we look into the causes 
 of his growing popularity, we shall find that a 
 considerable part of his writing is just the sort 
 of spasmodic commonplace that enraptures the 
 half-cultured and flatters them with thinking 
 they have discovered a profound philosophical 
 basis for their untutored emotions. But withal 
 he cannot be quite so easily disposed of. He may 
 be, like Poe, "three-fifths of him genius and two- 
 fifths mere fudge"; but the inspired part of him 
 is the provocative and, it might be said, final ex- 
 pression of one side of the contest between the 
 principles of egotism and sympathy that for two 
 centuries and more has been waging for the polity 
 and morals of the world. We cannot rightly un- 
 derstand Nietzsche unless we find his place in 
 this long debate, and to do this we must take a 
 rapid glance backward. 
 
 The problem to which Nietzsche gives so abso- 
 lute an answer was definitely posed in the eight- 
 eenth century but its peculiarity is best shown 
 by comparing it with the issue as seen in the pre- 
 ceding age. To the dominant moralists of the 
 seventeenth century the basis of human nature 
 was a pure egotism. La Rochefoucauld gave the 
 most finished expression to this belief in his doc- 
 trine of amour-propre, displaying itself in a vanity 
 that takes pleasure in the praise of ourselves and 
 a jealousy that takes umbrage at the praise of
 
 156 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 others. In England the motive of egotism had 
 already been developed by Hobbes into a com- 
 plete philosophy of the State. " In the first 
 place," said Hobbes, "I put forth, for a general 
 incHnation of all mankind, a perpetual and rest- 
 I less desire of power after power, that ceaseth only 
 vin death." The natural condition of mankind, 
 therefore, is that every man's hand should be 
 against every other man, and society is the result 
 ^ of a compact by which individuals, since each is 
 unable to defend himself alone against the pas- 
 ..sions of all others, are driven to mutual conces- 
 .^sions. The contrary principle of natural sym- 
 pathy was involved in the political theories of 
 Grotius and his followers. It is even more fully 
 implied in the vagaries of certain of the sects 
 commonly called Levellers, underlying, for exam- 
 ple, the protest of the fanatic company of Dig- 
 gers who, when arrested for starting a communis- 
 tic settlement in Surrey, declared that "the time 
 of deliverance was at hand ; and God would bring 
 His People out of slavery, and restore them to 
 their freedom in enjoying the fruits and benefits 
 
 of the Earth That their intent is to restore 
 
 the Creation to its former condition That the 
 
 times will suddenly be, when all men shall will- 
 ingly come and give up their lands and estates, 
 and submit to this Community of Goods." 
 
 In this opposition between Hobbes's notion of 
 the natural condition of man as one of warfare.
 
 NIETZSCHE 157 
 
 and the humble effort of the Diggers to restore 
 mankind to a primitive state of equahty and fra- 
 ternity, one may see foreshadowed the ethical the- 
 ories of self-interest and benevolence which were 
 to be developed in the next century. But there 
 was an element in the theorizing of the seven- 
 teenth century which separates these men from 
 their successors. Above the idea of nature hov- 
 ered, more or less distinctly, the idea of a super- 
 natural power. Even Hobbes, though he was re- 
 pudiated by his own party as an atheist, and 
 though his philosophy was in itself one of pure 
 naturalism, was led by the spirit of the age to 
 complete his conception of the civil common- 
 wealth dependent on the law of nature with a 
 Christian commonwealth based on supernatural 
 revelation and the will of God. So, on the other 
 hand, the political schemes of fraternity were 
 almost universally subordinate to notions of the- 
 ocratic government. Of purely natural sympa- 
 thy, as it was later to be developed into the sole 
 source of virtue, the epoch had comparatively 
 little thought. This distinction is of the utmost 
 importance in the history of ethics, and may be 
 rendered more precise by consideration of a 
 few lines from that erudite scholar, but crabbed 
 poet. Dr. Henry More. In his Cupid's Conflict 
 the great Platonist becomes almost lyrical when 
 this theme is touched :
 
 158 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 When I my self from mine own self do quit 
 
 And each thing else; then an all-spreaden love 
 
 To the vast Universe my soul doth fit, 
 
 Makes me half equall to All-seeing Jove. 
 
 My mightie wings high stretch'd then clapping light 
 I brush the starres and make them shine more bright. 
 
 Then all the works of God with close embrace 
 I dearly hug in my enlarged arms, 
 All the hid paths of heavenly Love I trace 
 And boldly listen to his secret charms. 
 
 The same idea occurs more than once in the 
 mystical doctor's prose, which was, if truth be 
 told, a good deal more poetical than his verse. 
 "And even the more Miserable Objects in this 
 present Scene of things," he somewhere writes, 
 "cannot divest him of his Happiness, but rather 
 modifie it; the Sweetness of his Spirit being 
 melted into a kindly compassion in the behalf of 
 Others : Whom if he be able to help, it is a greater 
 Accession to his Joy; and if he cannot, the being 
 Conscious to himself of so sincere a compassion, 
 and so harmonious and suitable to the present 
 State of things, carries along with it some degree 
 of Pleasure, like Mournful Notes of Musick ex- 
 quisitely well fitted to the Sadness of the Ditty." 
 ""Hft is clear that this sense of compassion is a mo- 
 tive utterly different in kind from the sympathy 
 which meant so much to the next age; to pass 
 from one to the other a great principle had to be 
 eliminated from the philosophy of human con- 
 duct, and this principle was manifestly the sense
 
 NIETZSCHE 159 
 
 of the divine, of the infinite which stood apart, 
 from mortal passions and of which some simula-; 
 crum resided in the human breast. The man who? 
 finally effected this revolution, partly by virtue \ 
 of his own genius and partly as spokesman of his 
 time, was John Locke, whose Essay Concerning 
 Human Understanding, published in 1690 as the 
 result of eighteen years of reflection, became the 
 bible, so to speak, of the next century. Locke did 
 not expressly deny the existence of a superna- 
 tural world. To explain our sense of morality he 
 still had recourse to a law of God imposed upon 
 man by decree and without any corresponding 
 law in nature ; and he began his philosophical dis- 
 cussion by a kind of apology, declaring that "God 
 having endued man with those faculties of know- 
 ing which he hath, was no more obliged by his 
 Goodness to plant those innate notions in his 
 mind, than that, having given him reason, hands, 
 and materials, He should build him bridges or 
 houses." But, having thus apologetically cleared ; 
 the field, Locke proceeded to elaborate a theory 
 of sensations and ideas which really leaves no/ 
 place in the human soul for anything outside of | 
 the phenomenal laws of nature. It was his task^ 
 to give a clear psychological basis to a philosophy 
 which had been struggling for existence through 
 the seventeenth century. 
 
 One of the first and strangest fruits of this new 
 naturalism was Mandeville's Fable of the Bees,
 
 i6o THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 which undertakes to show by the apologue of a 
 hive of bees that the welfare of a State is the re- 
 sult of the counterbalancing of the passions of its 
 individual citizens, that, in a word, private vices 
 are pubUc virtues: 
 
 Thus every Part was full of Vice, 
 Yet the whole Mass a Paradise. 
 
 The poem in itself was not much more than a 
 clever jeu d' esprit, but the Remarks and the In- 
 quiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, which he 
 published in defence of his thesis, are among the 
 acutest psychological tracts of the age. " I be- 
 lieve man," he says, " (besides skin, flesh, bones, 
 etc., that are obvious to the eye) to be a com- 
 pound of various passions, that all of them, as 
 they are provoked and come uppermost, govern 
 him by turns, whether he will or no." The pas- 
 sions which produce the effect of virtue are those 
 that spring from pride and the sense of power and 
 the desire of luxury. " Pity," he adds, " though it 
 is the most gentle and the least mischievous of all 
 our passions, is yet as much a frailty of our na- 
 ture, as anger, pride, or fear. The weakest minds 
 have generally the greatest share of it, for which 
 reason none are more compassionate than women 
 and children." Such a theory of the passions is a 
 legitimate, if onesided, deduction from the natur- 
 alistic philosophy as it left the hands of Locke; 
 the ethical conclusions, it will be observed, have
 
 NIETZSCHE i6i 
 
 a curious similarity with the later system of 
 Nietzsche. The theory of Mandeville was too 
 violently in opposition to the common sense of 
 mankind to produce much direct influence, but it 
 remained as a great scandal of letters. It brought 
 the author an indictment before the grand jury 
 of Middlesex for impiety; and as late as 1765 
 Diderot, in his criticism of a large and inartis- 
 tic painting, could be understood when he ex- 
 claimed: "What shall we do with such a thing? 
 You who defend the Fable of the Bees will no 
 doubt say to me that it brings money to the sell- 
 ers of paints and canvas. To the devil with so- 
 phists ! With them good and evil no longer exist 1 ' ' 
 The real exegete of Locke's Scripture, he who 
 made naturalism current by finding within it, 
 without recourse to any extrinsic law, a sufficient 
 principle of moral conduct, was David Hume. 
 Hume's Treatise of Human Nature, published in 
 1739 and 1740, fell dead from the press, and was 
 in part repudiated when in 1 751, he put forth his 
 shorter Inquiry into the Principles of Morals. Yet 
 there is in reality no fundamental difference be- 
 tween his earlier and later theories, and the doc- 
 trines which passed to Rousseau and Kant were 
 fully and definitely pronounced in the Treatise 
 written before the author had completed his 
 twenty-ninth year. Those doctrines had been 
 foreshadowed, so to speak, by Shaftesbury, but 
 Shaftesbury, though one of the leading influences
 
 i62 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 of the age, was too confused or indolent a thinker 
 to clear his ideas of the gorgeous rhetoric that 
 involved them. With Hume rhetoric was sup- 
 planted by an insatiable desire of analysis. He 
 ; begins by resolving the world into an absolute 
 I flux, wherein the only reality for us is a succes- 
 \ sion of sensations, beyond which all is a fiction of 
 the imagination. I enter a room and perceive a 
 certain chair; if after an interval of time I return 
 to the room and perceive the same chair, the feel- 
 ing that this object of perception and the former 
 are identical is merely created by my "propen- 
 sity to feign." Our notion of cause and effect is 
 likewise a fiction, due to the fact that we have 
 perceived a certain sequence of phenomena a 
 number of times, and have come to associate 
 them together; we have no real assurance that a 
 similar sequence will happen another time. And 
 human nature is equally a flux, without any ele- 
 ment of unity or identity. An idea is nothing 
 more than a reproduced and fainter sensation, 
 and all knowledge is nothing more than probabil- 
 ity. There is no persistent self, but only a "suc- 
 cession of related ideas and impressions, of which 
 we have an intimate memory and consciousness." 
 In this flood of sensations pleasure and pain alone 
 can be the motives of action, and to pleasure and 
 pain alone our notion of virtue and vice must be 
 ultimately reduced. 
 
 In his analysis of the moral sense Hume begins
 
 NIETZSCHE 163 
 
 with the conception of property, upon which 
 he raises the superstructure of society. Self-inter- 
 est is fundamentally opposed to admitting the 
 claims of others to possession, but the only way I 
 can be assured of retaining what I possess is by 
 allowing my neighbour to retain what he pos- 
 sesses. Justice, then, is a mutual concession of 
 self-interests for the advantage of each. A just 
 act is an act that is useful at once to society and 
 the individual by strengthening the security of 
 property. But a just act is not in itself virtuous; 
 the sense of virtue is the agreeable emotion, or 
 passion, as Hume calls it, that comes to us when 
 we perceive a man perform an act of justice 
 which, by the power of throwing ourselves sym- 
 pathetically into the position of others, we feel to 
 be indirectly useful to ourselves. The pleasurable 
 emotion of self-interest is the motive of just 
 action, the pleasurable emotion of sympathy with | 
 an act of justice in which we are not immediately!' 
 concerned is the sense of virtue. Besides this pas-j 
 sion of justice which is necessary for the very ex-' 
 istence of society, Hume recognized certain minor 
 passions, such as benevolence, which are not in- 
 stigated by mutual self-interest, but spring di- 
 rectly from the inherent tendency of man to sym- 
 pathize with his fellows. Manifestly there are 
 serious difficulties in this reduction of virtue and 
 vice to agreeable and disagreeable passions. It 
 leaves no motive for virtue when the individual
 
 i64 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 has become conscious of the basis of justice in the 
 mutual concessions of self-interest, and asks why- 
 he should not foster this concession by the ap- 
 pearance of surrendering his native rights while 
 secretly grasping all in his power; it furnishes no 
 clear difference between the passions which actu- 
 ate the hero and the gourmet, between a Nathan 
 Hale uttering his regret that he had only one life 
 to give for his country and a Talleyrand saying 
 placidly, "Fate cannot harm me; I have dined." 
 The lacunae point to some vital error in Hume's 
 philosophy, but his theory of self-interest and 
 sympathy was none the less the first clear expres- 
 sion of a revolutionary change in thought and 
 morals. 
 
 Twenty years after the date of Hume's Treatise 
 his friend Adam Smith published The Theory of 
 Moral Sentiments, in which the doctrine of sym- 
 pathy was carried a long step forward. Utility is 
 still the measure of virtue and vice, but a man 
 now not only has the sense of virtue from sym- 
 pathy with an act of justice, but is himself led to 
 act justly through a sense of sympathy with the 
 feelings that his conduct will arouse in others. 
 Furthermore, through the habit of reflection we 
 come to harbour a kind of impersonal sympathy 
 with, or antipathy to, our own acts similar to that 
 which we feel for the acts of others. " It is not," 
 says Smith, "the love of our neighbour, it is not 
 the love of mankind, which upon many occasions
 
 NIETZSCHE 165 
 
 prompts us to the practice of those divine virtues. 
 It is a stronger love, a more powerful affection 
 which generally takes place upon such occasions; 
 the love of what is honourable and noble, of the 
 grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own 
 characters." Thus in the system of Adam Smith 
 sympathy becomes the actuating cause of virtue 
 and is even able to transform self-love into a mo- 
 tive wearing the mask of absolute virtue. 
 
 Not the least significant feature of the advance 
 from Hume's philosophy is the introduction of 
 the word "sentiment" into the title of Adam 
 Smith's treatise, for during the remaining years 
 of the century the chief development of the doc- 
 trine of sympathy in England is found in the 
 novelists of the sentimental school. ''Sentimental! 
 what is that?" is the record in Wesley's Journal 
 after reading Sterne's Sentimental Journey. "It 
 is not English : he might as well say Continental. 
 It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea; 
 yet one fool makes many. And this nonsensical 
 word (who would believe it?) is become a fash- 
 ionable one ! ' ' The hypercritical evangelist might 
 have been told that if the word conveyed no de- 
 terminate idea, it at least represented a very 
 definite force and had a perfectly clear origin. 
 It was nothing else but the logical outcome of 
 Hume's and Adam Smith's theory of sympathy 
 entirely dissevered from any supernatural prin- 
 ciple as the source of virtue. From 1760 to 1768
 
 166 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Sterne was issuing the successive volumes of 
 Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey, 
 in which this virtue of sentimental sympathy, 
 reduced to pure sensibility, if not to morbidly 
 sensitive nerves, and utterly freed from reason 
 or character or the law of cause and effect, ap- 
 pears full-blown. Whatever practical moral these 
 books may have is to be found in the episode 
 of my Uncle Toby tenderly letting the buzzing 
 fly out of the window or in the tears of the pil- 
 grim over the carcass of a dead ass. If Sterne's 
 sentiment was apt to grow a trifle maudlin, that 
 of his contemporary, Henry Brooke, was a con- 
 stant downflow of soul. "This is a book of tears," 
 says a modern editor of Brooke's Fool of Quality; 
 "but they are tears that purge and purify with 
 pity and compassion." I am inclined to think 
 the purging for many readers to-day would come 
 more from ridicule than from pity ; but the book 
 is notable as an attempt to depict a life made 
 completely virtuous by the new sentiment of 
 sympathy for all mankind. Hearken for a minute 
 to one of the sermons of the pious Mentor of the 
 story to his youthful charge: 
 
 I once told you, my darling [he says], that all the evil 
 which is in you belongs to yourself, and that all the good 
 which is in you belongs to your God. . . . 
 
 Remember, therefore, this distinction in yourself and 
 all others; remember that, when you feel or see any 
 instance of selfishness, you feel and see the coveting,
 
 NIETZSCHE 167 
 
 grudging, and grappling of the creature; but that, when 
 you feel or see any instance of benevolence, you feel and 
 see the informing influence of your God. All possible 
 vice and malignity subsists in the one; all possible virtue, 
 all possible beauty, all possible blessedness, subsists in 
 the other. 
 
 Now two things are remarkable in this passage, 
 and would stand out even more plainly if I should 
 quote at greater length. First, we have got com- 
 pletely away from the utilitarian theory of social 
 virtue as a mutual concession of self-interests, 
 which was propounded by Hobbes and essen- 
 tially retained by Locke and Hume and Adam 
 Smith, though gradually overlaid by the modi- 
 fying power of sympathy. In Brooke's philos- 
 ophy self-interest and benevolence are finally 
 and absolutely sundered: the one is all vice, the 
 other is all virtue. And, secondly, we may see 
 here how far this newer notion of sympathy is 
 removed from the compassion of Hobbes's Pla- 
 tonizing contemporary^ ; the contrast is even more 
 vivid from the fact that Brooke gives a thor- 
 oughly Christian turn to the expression of the 
 "eternal law of benevolence," as he calls it. In 
 Henry More the "kindly compassion" for the 
 world is entirely subsidiary to the rapture of 
 a spirit caught up in celestial contemplation, 
 whereas in The Fool of Quality love is indeed 
 planted in us by a divine hand as a force contrary 
 to what Brooke calls "the very horrible and de-
 
 i68 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 testable nature of Self," but its total meaning 
 and effect are in a sentimental dissolution of 
 man's self in the idea of humanity. We have 
 reached, that is to say, the genuine springs of hu- 
 manitarianism. 
 
 Meanwhile the doctrine of sympathy had 
 passed in France into the pen, if not into the 
 heart, of one whose genius was to give it a new 
 colour and a power sufficient to crush and re- 
 mould societies. It is not necessary to go at 
 large into well-known theories of Rousseau. In 
 his Discourse on Inequality (1755) and his Social 
 Contract (1762) he, like his English predecessors, 
 starts with the motives of self-interest and sym- 
 pathy, but soon gives them a different direction. 
 He saw, as did Hobbes and Hume, that property 
 depends on the mutual concessions of self-inter- 
 est, but he saw further that on this basis alone 
 society and traditional morality were in a condi- 
 tion of unstable equilibrium, were in fact founded 
 on injustice and not on justice at all. He per- 
 ceived no relief from this hazardous condition ex- 
 cept through counteracting self-interest by the 
 equally innate and human force of sympathy, 
 which was somehow to be called into action as 
 the volonte generale, or mystical will of the people, 
 embracing and absorbing the wills and desires of 
 individuals into one harmonious purpose. 
 
 One step more and we shall have ended this 
 preliminary history of the growth of sympathy as
 
 NIETZSCHE 169 
 
 .the controlling princip le of mpials^ _From Rous- 
 s eau it_2 assed into Germany and became one of 
 the mainsprings of The romantic movement. You 
 will find its marks everywhere in that literature : 
 ilL.the peculiarly sentimental attitude towards 
 nature, in the impossible yearning of the schbne 
 Seelen for brotherhood, in the whole philosophy 
 of feeling . I am not sure that it does not lurk in 
 Kant's fundamental rule of morality: 'J Act on a ^ 
 maxim which thou canst will to be law universal " ; -''"^^^'^'^ 
 it certainly lives and finds its highest expression 
 Tn Schleiermacher's attempt to reunite the indi- 
 vidual with the infinite by dissolving the mind 
 in sympathetic contemplation of the flowing uni- 
 verse of things. And in this heated, unwhole- 
 some atmosphere of German romanticism sprang ' 
 up and blossomed our modern ethics of human- 
 itarianism. The theories of socialism are diverse -^^ 
 and often superficially contradictory; they pro- 
 fess to stand on a foundation of economic law 
 and the necessity of evolution, but in reality they 
 spring from ^^ousseau's ideal of sympathy work- 
 ing itself out as a force sufficient in itself to com- 
 bine the endless oppositions of self-interest in the 
 vglqnte generale, and from the romantic concep- 
 tion of the infinite as an emotion obtained from 
 smrender of self to the universal flux. From the 
 Tormer come the political schemes of human- 
 itarianism ; from the latter its religious sanction 
 and fanatical intolerance. "^
 
 I70 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 This survey of the growth _of^self-interesJt and 
 sympathy may seem a long parenthesis in the 
 'study of Nietzsche, but I do not see how other- 
 wise we can understand the problem with which 
 he struggled, or the meaning of his proposed so- 
 lution. Now, Nietzsche's writing, as I have said, 
 is too often in a style of spasmodic commonplace, 
 displaying a tortured effort to appear profound. 
 But it is in places also singularly vivid, with a 
 power of clinging epithet and a picturesque ex- 
 aggeration or grotesqueness that may remind one 
 of Carlyle. Consider, for example, part of the 
 chapter of Zarathustra entitled Redemption: 
 
 As Zarathustra one day passed over the great bridge, 
 he was surrounded by cripples and beggars, and a 
 hunchback spake thus to him: 
 
 "Behold, Zarathustra, even the people learn from 
 thee, and acquire faith in thy doctrine; but for these to 
 believe fully in thee, one thing is yet needful — thou 
 must first of all convince us cripples." . . . 
 
 Then answered Zarathustra unto him who so spake: 
 . . . Yet is this the smallest thing to me since I have been 
 amongst men, that one man lacks an eye, another an 
 ear, a third a leg, and that others have lost their tongue, 
 or their nose, or their head. 
 
 I see and have seen a worse thing and diverse things 
 80 monstrous that of all I might not speak and of some 
 I might not keep silence: I have seen human beings to 
 whom everything was lacking, except that of one thing 
 they had too much — men who are nothing more than 
 a big eye, or a big mouth, or a big belly, or something 
 ; else big — reversed cripples I name such men. 
 
 And when I came out of my solitude and for the first
 
 NIETZSCHE 171 
 
 time passed over this bridge, then I could not trust my 
 eyes, and looked, and looked again, and I said at last: 
 "That is an ear! an ear as big as a man!" I looked still 
 more attentively; and actually there did move under the 
 ear something that was pitiably small and poor and slim. 
 And in truth this immense ear was perched on a small 
 thin stalk — and the stalk was a man! With a glass be- 
 fore your eyes you might even recognize further a tiny 
 envious countenance, and also that a bloated soullet 
 dangled at the stalk. The people told me, however, that 
 the big ear was not only a man, but a great man, a 
 genius. But I never believed the people when they 
 spake of great men — and I hold to my belief that it was 
 a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything and 
 too much of one thing. . . . 
 
 Verily, my friends, I walk amongst men as amongst 
 the fragments and limbs of men! 
 
 This is the terrible thing to mine eye, that I find men 
 broken up and scattered as on a field of battle and 
 butchery. 
 
 And when mine eye fleeth from the present to the by- 
 gone, it findeth always the same: fragments and mem- 
 bers and fearful chance — but no men ! 
 
 The present and the bygone upon earth — alas, my 
 friends, that is to me the intolerable; and I should not 
 know how to live were I not a seer also of that which 
 must come. 
 
 A seer, a wilier, a creator, a future itself, and a bridge 
 to the future — and, alas, also as it were a cripple upon 
 this bridge: all that is Zarathustra. . . . 
 
 To redeem what is past, and to transform every "It 
 was" into "Thus would I have it!" — that alone I call 
 redemption. . . . 
 
 To will liberateth ; but what is that named which still 
 putteth the liberator in chains ? 
 
 " It was" — so is named the Will's gnashing of teeth
 
 172 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 and loneliest tribulation. Impotent before the thing 
 that has been done, of all the past the Will is a malicious 
 spectator.^ 
 
 That is not only an example of Nietzsche's 
 vivid and personal style at its best, but it also 
 contains the gist of his message to the world. For 
 there is this to be observed in regard to Nietz- 
 sche's works: to one who dips into them at ran- 
 dom, they are likely to seem dark and tangled. 
 His manner of expressing himself in aphorisms 
 and of uttering half-truths in emphatic finality 
 gives t'o'Tiis writing an appearance of complex- 
 ity and groping uncertainty; but a little persist- 
 ence in reading will show that his theory of life, 
 though never systematized, was really quite sim- 
 ple, and that he had in fact a few master ideas 
 which he repeated in endlessly diversified lan- 
 guage. It soon becomes easy to disentangle this 
 main current of his ideas from the sporadic ob- 
 servations on life and art, often sound and ex- 
 tremely acute, which have no relation to it. Any 
 one of his major works will afford a fairly com- 
 plete view of his central doctrine: it will be found 
 in Human All-Too-Human to implicate pretty 
 fully the Bergsonian philosophy and two or three 
 other much-vaunted philosophies of the self- 
 evolving flux; in Beyond Good and Evil the eth- 
 
 * The quotations from Nietzsche in this essay are for the most part 
 based on the authorized translations of his works, but I have had the 
 German text before me and have altered the English at times consider- 
 ably.
 
 NIETZSCHE 173 
 
 ical aspects of the new liberty are chiefly consid- 
 ered ; in Zarathustra, on the whole the greatest of 
 his works, he writes in a tone of lyrical egotism 
 and prophetic brooding on his own destiny; in 
 The Will to Power there is an attempt to reduce 
 his scattered intentions to a logical system, but 
 unfortunately that work was never finished, and 
 is printed largely from his hasty notes. What 
 probably first impresses one in any of these books 
 is Nietzsche's violent antipathy to the past — 
 "'It^was' — so is named the Will's gnashing of 
 teeth and loneliest tribulation. Impotent before 
 the thing that has been done, of all the past the 
 Will is a malicious spectator." In this appar- 
 ently sweeping condemnation of tradition all that 
 has been held sacred is denounced in language 
 that sounds occasionally like the fury of a mad- 
 man. So he exclaims: "To the botching of man- 
 kind and the allowing of it to putrefy was given 
 the name ' God ' " ; and to our long idealization 
 of the eternal feminine he has only the brusque 
 reply: "Thou goest to women? Forget not thy 
 whip!" 
 
 But as we become better versed in Nietzsche's 
 extreme manner of expression, we find that his 
 condemnation of the past is by no means indis- 
 criminate, that in truth his denunciations are 
 directed to a particular aspect of history. In the 
 classical world this distinction takes the form of 
 a harsh and unreal contrast between the Diony-
 
 X74 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 ^ siac principle of unrest and growth and crea- 
 (l^^ tion for which he expresses the highest regard, 
 and the Apollonian principle of rest and renun- 
 rrt\N'^u^ elation and contraction for which, as Platonism, 
 [t^i- he has the deepest aversion. The same distinc- 
 tion really holds in his attitude towards religion, 
 although here his feelings are not so clearly 
 defined. For the Old Testament and its virile, 
 human poetry, for instance, he admits great re- 
 verence, reserving his spleen for the New Testa- 
 ment and its faith. In one of the aphorisms of his 
 virulent attack on Christianity, entitled appro- 
 priately Antichrist, he writes: 
 
 One does well to put on gloves when reading the New 
 Testament., The neighbourhood of so much impurity 
 almost forces one to do so. ... I have searched the New 
 Testament in vain for a single sympathetic trait; there 
 is nothing in it that could be called free, kind, frank, up- 
 right. Humanity has not taken its first steps in this 
 book — instincts of purity are lacking. There are only 
 bad instincts in the New Testament; and there is not 
 even the courage of these bad instincts. All is cowardice 
 in it, all is closed eyes and self-delusion. Any book is 
 pure after one has read the New Testament; for exam- 
 ple, immediately after St. Paul, I read with delight that 
 charming wanton mocker, Petronius, of whom one might 
 say what Domenico Boccaccio wrote about Cesare Bor- 
 gia to the Duke of Parma : t tutto festo. 
 
 To understand these diatribes we must re- 
 member that there were two elements in Christ- 
 ianity as it developed in the early centuries: on
 
 NIETZSCHE 175 
 
 the one hand, the strong aspiring faith of a peo- 
 plelrTthe vigour of youth and eager to bring into 
 life fresh and unworn spiritual values, and, on the 
 other hand, the depression and world -weariness 
 which haunted the decadent heterogeneous peo- 
 ple of Alexandria and the East. Now it is clear 
 that for the former of these Nietzsche had no un- 
 derstanding, since it lay quite beyond his range 
 of vision, whereas for the latter he had a very 
 intimate understanding and a bitter detestation. 
 Hence his almost unreserved rejection of Christ- 
 ianity as a product of corruption and race im- 
 
 ^rityT'""^' 
 
 It is a mistake [he says in The Will to Power] to imag- 
 ine that, with Christianity, an ingenuous and youthful 
 people rose against an old culture. . . . We understand 
 nothing of the psychology of Christianity, if we suppose 
 that it was the expression of revived youth among a 
 people, or of the resuscitated strength of a race. It is 
 rather a typical form of decadence, of moral softening, 
 and of hysteria, amid a general hotchpotch of races and 
 people that had lost all aims and had grown weary and 
 sick. The wonderful company which gathered round 
 this master seducer of the populace, would not be at all 
 out of place in a Russian novel: all the diseases of the 
 nerves seem to give one another a rendezvous in this 
 crowd. 
 
 And elsewhere he says, more generally : 
 
 Long pondering over the physiology of exhaustion 
 forced upon me the question: to what extent the judge- 
 ments of exhausted people had percolated into the world 
 of values.
 
 176 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 The result at which I arrived was as startling as it 
 could possibly be — even for one like myself who was 
 already at home in many a strange world. I found that 
 all prevailing valuations — that is to say, all those which 
 had gained ascendancy over humanity, or at least over 
 its tamer portions, could be traced back to the judge- 
 ment ofL ^hausted p eople. 
 
 Now all this is the perfectly correct statement 
 of a half-truth, as any one must admit who is 
 familiar with the religious history of the early 
 centuries; it is largely correct also as regards the 
 romantic revival of Alexandrianism, which in 
 Nietzsche's eyes made up the whole of modern 
 Christianity. The fact is that his mind was really 
 concerned with certain aspects of society as it 
 existed about him, and his hostility to the past 
 was not to the dead centuries in themselves, but 
 to what remained over from them in the present 
 — for what, after all, is there for any man in the 
 past to hate or fear, except as it lives and will not 
 be put away? In the sickness of his soul Nietzsche 
 looked abroad over the Western world, and saw, 
 or thought he saw, everywhere futility and pur- 
 poselessness and pessimistic uncertainty of the 
 
 f values of life. An ideal, as he sees it, is embraced 
 only when a man's grip on the real world and its 
 good has been weakened ; in the end such super- 
 natural ideals, as they are without foundation in 
 iact, lose their hold on the human mind, and 
 mankind, having sacrificed Its sense of actual
 
 NIETZSCHE 177 
 
 values and having nursed the cause of decay, is 
 left helpless and joyless. This condition he calls 
 ^Nihilism. "People have not yet seen what is 
 so perfectly obvious," he says, — "namely, that 
 Pessimism is not a problem but a symptom — 
 that the term ought to be replaced by ' Nihilism ' ; 
 that the question, 'to be or not to be' is itself 
 an illness, a sign of degeneracy, an idiosyncrasy." 
 And in the first part of The Will to Power he un- 
 folds this modern disease in all its hideousness. 
 The restless activities of our life he interprets as 
 so many attempts to escape from the gloom of 
 purposelessness, as so many varieties of self- 
 stupefaction. No one can read his list of these 
 efforts without shuddering recollection of what 
 decadent music and literature and painting have 
 produced : 
 
 In one's heart of hearts, not to know, whither? 
 Emptiness. The attempt to rise superior to it all by 
 means of emotional intoxication: emotional intoxication 
 in the form of music, in the form of cruelty in the tragic 
 joy over the ruin of the noblest, and in the form of blind, 
 gushing enthusiasm over individual men or distinct 
 periods (in the form of hatred, etc.). The attempt to 
 work blindly, like a scientific instrument; to keep an eye 
 on the many small joys, like an investigator, for instance 
 (modesty towards one's self) ; . . . the mysticism of the 
 voluptuousjoy of eternal emptiness; art "for art's sake" 
 ("le fait"), "immaculate investigation," in the form of 
 narcotics against the disgust of one's self; any kind 
 of incessant work, any kind of small foolish fanaticism.
 
 178 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 The attempt to maintain Christianity amidst 
 a nihilistic society which has lost even its false 
 ideals, can have only one result. As these super- 
 natural ideals were evoked by the weaker mass of 
 the race to cover its subjection to the few stronger 
 individuals, so when belief in the other world has 
 perished, the only defence that remains is the hu- 
 manitarian exaltation of the humble and common 
 and undistinguished in itself as a kind of simula- 
 crum of Christianity, the unideal sympathy of 
 man for man as a political law, the whole brood 
 of socialistic schemes which are based on the 
 notion of universal brotherhood. These, the im- 
 mediate offspring of Rousseauism and German 
 romanticism, are, as Nietzsche saw, the actual re- 
 ligion of the world to-day ; and against these, and 
 against the past as the source of these, his dia- 
 tribes are really directed. His protest is against 
 "sympathy with the lowly and the suffering as 
 a standard for the elevation of the soul.^' 
 
 Christianity the exclaims] is a degenerative move- 
 ment, consisting of all kinds of decaying and excre- 
 mental elements. ... It appeals to the disinherited 
 everywhere; it consists of a foundation of resentment 
 against all that is successful and dominant: it is in need 
 of a symbol which represents the damnation of every 
 thing successful and dominant. It is opposed to every 
 form of intellectual movement, to all philosophy ; it takes 
 up the cudgels for idiots, and utters a curse upon all 
 intellect. Resentment against those who are gifted, 
 learned, intellectually independent: in all these it sus- 
 pects the elements of success and domination.
 
 NIETZSCHE 179 
 
 All this is merely Nietzsche's spasmodic way 
 of depicting the uneasiness of the age, which has 
 been the theme of innumerable poets of the nine- 
 teenth century — of Matthew Arnold, to take an 
 instance, in his gloomy diagnosis of the modern 
 soul. And to a certain point the cause of this 
 nihilism, to use Nietzsche's word, is the same for 
 him as for Arnold. They both attribute it to the 
 shattering of definite ideals that had so long 
 ruled the world, and especially to the waning of 
 religious faith. But here the two diagnosticians 
 part company. Arnold looked for health to the 
 establishing of new ideals and to the growth of a 
 ^esh and sounder faith in the Eternal, though he 
 may have failed in his attempt to define this new 
 faith. Nietzsche, on the contrary, regarded all 
 ideals and all faith as themselves a product of 
 decadence and the sure cause of deeper decay. 
 "Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of 
 irony," he says, "are signs of health; everything 
 absolute belongs to pathology." Nihilism, as the 
 first consequence of the loss of ideals, may be a 
 state of hideous anarchy, but it is also the neces- 
 sary transition to health. If, instead of relapsing 
 into the idealistic source of evil, the eyes of man- 
 kind are strengthened to look boldly at the facts 
 of existence, then will take place what he calls 
 the Transvaluation of all Values, and truth will_ 
 be founded on the naked, imperishable reality. 
 There is no eternal calm at the centre of this mov-
 
 i8o THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 ing universe; "all is flux"; there is nothing real 
 "but our world of desires and passions," and "we 
 cannot sink or rise to any other ' reality ' save just 
 the reality of our impulses — for thinking itself is 
 only a relation of these impulses to one another." 
 So be it! When a man has faced this truth 
 calmly and bravely and definitely, Jhen the 
 whole system of morality which has been im- 
 posed upon society by those who regarded life as 
 subordinate to an eternal ideal outside of the flux 
 and contrary to the stream of human desires and 
 passions — then the whole law of good and evil 
 which was evolved by the weak to protect them- 
 selves against those who were fitted to live mas- 
 terfully in the flux, crumbles away; that man has 
 passed Beyond Good and Evil. 
 
 Mankind is thus liberated from the herd-law, 
 the false values have been abolished, but what 
 new values take their place? The answer to this 
 question Nietzsche found by going to Darwinism 
 and raising the evolutionary struggle for exist- 
 ence into new significance ; he would call it, not 
 the Schopenhauerian will to live, but the Will to 
 Power. He thus expresses the new theory in the 
 mouth of Zarathustra: , 
 
 Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will to 
 Power; and even in the will of the servant found I the 
 will to be master. . . . 
 
 And this secret spake Life herself unto me. " Behold," 
 said she, " I am that which must ever surpass itself.". . .
 
 NIETZSCHE i8i 
 
 He certainly did not hit the truth who shot at it the 
 formula: "Will to Existence"; that will — doth not 
 exist ! 
 
 For that which is not, cannot will; that, however, 
 which is in existence — how could it still strive for exist- 
 ence! 
 
 Only where there is life, is there also will: not, how- 
 ever, Will to Life, but — so teach I thee — Will to 
 Power 1 
 
 This is Nietzsche's transvaluation of all values, 
 the change from the morality of good and evil de- 
 pending on supernatural rewards to the non- 
 morality of the purely natural Will to Power. 
 And as the former idealism resulted in the sup- 
 pression of distinction and in the supremacy of 
 the feeble, so the regime of the Will to Power 
 must bring back into society the sharp division of 
 those who have power and those who have it not, 
 of the true philosophers who have the instinct 
 jto surpass and the slaves whose function it is to 
 serve and obey. The philosopher, to use Nietz- 
 sche's famous term, is the Superman, the Ueber- 
 mensch. He has passed beyond good and evil, 
 and Nietzsche often describes him in language 
 which implies the grossest immorality; but this is 
 merely an iconoclast's way of emphasizing the 
 contrast between Jns perfect man and the old 
 ideal of the saint, and it would be unfair to take 
 these ebullitions of temper quite literally. The 
 image of the Superman is, in fact, left in the hazy 
 uncertainty of the future; the only thing certain
 
 i82 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 about him is his complete immersion in nature, 
 and his ofifice to raise the level of society by rising 
 on the shoulders of those who do the menial work 
 of the world. At the last analysis the Superman 
 is merely a negation of humanitarian sympathy 
 and of the socialistic state of indistinguished 
 equality. 
 
 "Kietzsche's conception of the Will to Power 
 may seem to have brought us back by a long cir- 
 cuit to Hobbes's definition of human nature as "a 
 perpetual and restless desire of power after power 
 that ceaseth only in death " ; but in reality there is 
 a whole world between the two. In the levelling 
 principles against which Hobbes directed his 
 theory of government there was little of that 
 notion of sympathy which is rooted in Locke's 
 naturalism and has its flower in German roman- 
 ticism; nor, on the other hand, is there in the 
 Hobbian picture of the natural state of mankind 
 as a warfare of self-interests any touch of that 
 morbid exaltation of the Ego which developed 
 as an inevitable concomitant of romantic sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 At the heart of Nietzsche's philosophy there is, 
 in fact, a colossal self-deception which has no 
 counterpart in Hobbism, and to which we shall 
 find no key unless we bear in mind the long and 
 regular growth of ideas from Locke to the present 
 day. Nietzsche looked upon himself as at least 
 an imperfect type of what the Superman was to
 
 NIETZSCHE 183 
 
 be, if not the actual Superman ; he thought of his 
 rebellion as an exemplification of the Will to 
 Power ; whereas the hated taint of decadence had 
 struck deep into his body and mind, while his 
 years of philosophizing were one long fretful 
 disease. He has himself, with the intermittent 
 clairvoyance of the morbid brain, pointed to the 
 confusion of phenomena which has led his follow- 
 ers to admire his intellectual productivity as 
 a proof of fundamental health. "History," he 
 observes, "discloses the terrible fact that the ex- 
 hausted have always been confounded with those 
 of the most abundant resources. . . . How is this 
 confusion possible? When he who was exhausted 
 stood forth with the bearing of a highly active and 
 energetic man (when degeneration implied a cer- 
 tain excess of spiritual and nervous discharge), 
 he was mistaken for the resourceful man. He 
 inspired terror." 
 
 By a similar illusion Nietzsche regarded the 
 self-assertive Superman as a true reaction against 
 the prevalent man of sympathy and as a cure for 
 the disease of the age. That much of Nietzsche's 
 protest against the excesses of humanitarianism 
 was sound and well directed, I for one am quite 
 ready to admit, ye saw, as few other men of our 
 day have seen, the danger that threatens true 
 progress in any system of education and govern- 
 ment which makes the advantage of the ordinary 
 rather than the distinguished man its first object. 
 
 ^
 
 i84 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 He saw with terrible clearness that much of our 
 most admired art is not art at all in the higher 
 sense of the word, but an appeal to morbid senti- 
 mentality. There is a humorous aspect to his 
 quarrel with Wagner, which was at bottom 
 caused by the clashing of two insanely jealous 
 egotisms. Nevertheless, there is an element of 
 truth in his condemnation of Wagner's opera as 
 typical of certain degenerative tendencies in 
 modern society; and many must agree with him 
 in his statement that Wagner "found in music 
 the means of exciting tired nerves, making it 
 thereby sick." Not without cause did Nietzsche 
 pronounce himself "the highest authority in the 
 /'" g/ world on the question of decadence." But the 
 cure Nietzsche proposed for these evils was itself 
 a part of the malady. The Superman, in other 
 words, is a product of the same naturalism which 
 produced the disease it would counteract; it is the 
 .last and most violent expression of the egotism, 
 ^or^self-interest, which Hume and all his followers 
 balanced with sympathy as the two springs of 
 human action. Sympathy, as we saw, gradually 
 usurped the place of self-interest as the recog- 
 nized motive of virtue and the source of happi- 
 ness, but here this strange thing will be observed : 
 where sympathy has been proclaimed most 
 loudly in theory, self-interest has often been most 
 dominant in practice. Sympathy first came to ex- 
 cess in the sentimental school, and the sentiment- 
 
 1
 
 NIETZSCHE 185 
 
 alists were notorious for their morbid egotism. 
 There may be some injustice to Sterne in Byron's 
 sneering remark that he preferred weeping over a 
 dead ass to reheving the want of a Hving mother, 
 but in a general way it hits exactly the character 
 of which the author of the Sentimental Journey 
 was a type. I came by chance the other day upon 
 a passage in an anonymous book of that age, 
 which expresses this contrast of theory and prac- 
 tice in the clearest terms: 
 
 By this system of things [that is, the sentimental 
 system] it is that strict justice is made to give way to 
 transient fits of generosity; and a benevolent turn of 
 mind supplants rigid integrity. The sympathetic heart, 
 not being able to behold misery without a starting tear of 
 compassion, is allowed, by the general suffrage, to atone 
 for a thousand careless actions, which infallibly bring 
 misery with them. In commercial life, the rich oppress 
 the poor, and contribute to hospitals; a monopolizer 
 renders thousands and tens of thousands destitute in 
 the course of traffic; but cheerfully solicits or encourages 
 subscriptions to alleviate their distress.^ 
 
 As for Rousseau, the great apostle of human- 
 ity, It is notorious that the principal trait of his 
 disposition was an egotism which made it impos- 
 sible for him to live at peace with his fellowmen. 
 " Benevolence to the whole species," said Burke, 
 having Rousseau in mind, "and want of feeling 
 for every individual with whom the professors 
 
 * John Buncle, Junior, Gentleman. 2 volumes. London, 1776, 1778. 
 The hero is supposed to be the son of Amory's John Buncle.
 
 \ 
 
 i86 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 come in contact, form the character of the new 
 
 philosophy." No one who has read the annals of 
 
 the romantic group of Germany need be told how 
 
 , their pantheistic philosophy was contradicted by 
 
 / the utterly impractical individualism of their 
 
 lives. Nor is the same paradox absent from 
 
 the modern socialistic theories that have sprung 
 
 . from romanticism ; it would be possible, I believe, 
 
 ■ in many cases to establish from statistics a di- 
 rect ratio between the spread of humanitarian 
 
 ■ schemes of reform and the increase of crime and 
 suicide. 
 
 The truth is, this inconsistency is inherent in 
 the very principles of naturalism. In a world 
 made up of passions and desires alone, the at- 
 tempt to enter into the personal emotions of 
 others will react in an intensifying of our own 
 emotions, and the effort to lose one's self in man- 
 kind will be balanced by a morbid craving for 
 the absorption of mankind in one's self. The 
 harsh contrast of sympathy and egotism is thus 
 an inevitable consequence of naturalism become 
 romantic, nor is it a mere chance that Tolstoy, 
 
 /With his exaltation of Rousseauism and of ab- 
 solute non-resistance and universal brotherhood, 
 should have been the contemporary of a philos- 
 opher who made Napoleon his ideal and preached 
 
 Vwar and the Superman as the healthy condi- 
 tion of society. Nietzsche himself, in one of his 
 moments of insight, recognizes this coexistence
 
 NIETZSCHE 187 
 
 of extremes as a sign of decadence. That they 
 spring from the same source is shown by the un- 
 expected resemblance they often display beneath 
 their superficial opposition. Perhaps the book 
 that comes closest to Zarathustra in its funda- 
 mental tone is just the Leaves of Grass, which in 
 its avowed philosophy of life would seem to 
 stand at the remotest distance. Nietzsche de- 
 nounces all levelling processes and proclaims a 
 society based frankly on differences of power; 
 Walt Whitman, on the contrary, denies all differ- 
 ences whatsoever and glorifies an absolute equal- 
 ity : yet as both start from the pure flux of nat- 
 uralism, so they both pass through a denial of 
 the distinction of good and evil based on the 
 old ideals, and end in an egotism which brings 
 aristocrat and democrat together in a strange and 
 unwilling brotherhood. 
 
 To any one caught in this net, life must be a 
 onesided fanaticism or a condition of vacillating 'if 
 unrest. The great tragedy of Nietzsche's ex- 
 istence was due to the fact that, while he per- 
 ceived the danger into which he had fallen, yet 
 his struggles to escape only entangled him more 
 desperately in the fatal mesh. His boasted trans- 
 valuation of all values was in reality a complete 
 devaluation, if I may coin the word, leaving him 
 more deeply immersed in the nihilism which he 
 exposed as the prime evil of modern civilization. 
 With Hume and the romantic naturalists he
 
 i88 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 < threw away both the reason and the intuition 
 j-fC^ into any superrational law beyond the stream of 
 ^\ (lesires and passions and impulses. He looked 
 into his own heart and into the world of phenom- 
 ena, and beheld there a ceaseless ebb and flow, 
 without beginning, without end, and without 
 meaning. The only law that he could discover, 
 the only rest for the mind, was some dimly fore- 
 seen return of all things back into their primor- 
 dial state, to start afresh on the same dark course 
 of chance — the Eternal Recurrence, he called it. 
 "No doubt," he once wrote, "there is a far-off, 
 invisible, and prodigious cycle which gives a com- 
 mon law to our little divagations: let us uplift 
 ourselves to this thought! But our life is too 
 short, our vision too feeble ; we must content our- 
 selves with this sublime possibility." At times 
 he sets up the ability to look undismayed into 
 this ever-turning wheel as the test that distin- 
 guishes the Superman from the herd. And this 
 is all Nietzsche could give to mankind by his 
 p- Will to Power and his Transvaluation of Values: 
 1 the will to endure the vision of endless, purpose- 
 l less mutation; the courage to stand without 
 N \ shame, naked in a world of chance ; the strength 
 I to accomplish — absolutely nothing. At times 
 ^le proclaims his creed with an effrontery of joy 
 over those who sink by the way and cry out for 
 help. Other times pity for so hapless a human- 
 ity wells up in his heart despite himself; and
 
 NIETZSCHE 189 
 
 more than once he admits that the last tempta- 
 tion of the Superman is sympathy for a race re- 
 volving blindly in this cycle of change — "Where 
 lie thy greatest dangers? In compassion." As 
 for himself, what he found in his philosophy, 
 what followed him in the end into the dark de- 
 scents of madness, is told in the haunting vision 
 of The Shadow in the last section of Zarathu- 
 stra : 
 
 "Have I — yet a goal ? A haven towards which my 
 sail is set ? 
 
 "A good wind ? Alas, he only who knoweth whither 
 he saileth, knoweth also what wind is good and a fair 
 wind for him. 
 
 "What still remaineth to me ? A heart weary and 
 flippant; a wandering will ; fluttering wings; a broken 
 spine. 
 
 "This seeking for my home: ah, Zarathustra, knowest 
 thou well, this seeking hath been my home-sickening; it 
 devoureth me. 
 
 "Where is — my home ? For it I ask and seek and 
 have sought, but have not found it. Oh eternal every- 
 where, oh eternal nowhere, oh eternal — in-vain!" 
 
 Thus spake the Shadow, and Zarathustra's counten- 
 ance grew longer at his words. "Thou art my Shadow!" 
 said he at last, with sadness. 
 
 The end of it all is the clamour of romantic 
 egotism turned into horror at its own vacuity 
 and of romantic sympathy turned into despair. 
 It is naturalism at war with itself and struggling 
 to escape from its own fatality. As I leave Nietz- 
 sche I think of the ancient tragedy in which Hera-
 
 igo THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 cles is represented as writhing in the embrace of 
 the Nessus-shirt he has himself put on, and rend- 
 ing his own flesh in a vain effort to escape its 
 poisonous web.
 
 HUXLEY
 
 HUXLEY 
 
 In a world that is governed by phrases we can- 
 not too often recur to the famihar saying of 
 Hobbes, that "words are wise men's counters, 
 they do but reckon by them ; but they are the 
 money of fools"; and so to-day, when the real 
 achievements of science have thrown a kind of 
 halo about the word and made it in the general 
 mind synonymous with truth, the first duty of 
 any one who would think honestly is to reach a 
 clear definition of what he means when he utters 
 the sanctified syllables. In this particular case 
 the duty and difficulty are the greater because 
 the word conveys three quite different meanings 
 which have correspondingly different values. 
 Positive science is one thing, but hypothetical 
 science is another thing, and philosophical sci- 
 ence ij still another; yet on the popular tongue, 
 nay, even in the writings of those who pretend 
 to extreme precision, these distinctions are often 
 forgotten, to the utter confusion of ideas. 
 
 By positive science I mean the observation 
 and classification of facts and the discovery of 
 those constant sequences in phenomena which 
 can be expressed in mathematical formulae or in 
 the generalized language of law; I mean that 
 procedure which Huxley had in mind when he
 
 194 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 said that science is "nothing but trained and 
 organized common sense, differing from the lat- 
 ter only as a veteran may differ from a raw re- 
 cruit: and its methods differ from those of com- 
 mon sense only so far as the guardsman's cut and 
 thrust differ from the manner in which a savage 
 wields his club." Now for such a procedure no 
 one can feel anything but the highest respect 
 — respect which in the lay mind may well 
 mount to admiration and even to awe. He has 
 but a poor imagination who cannot be stirred to 
 / wonder before the triumphs over material forces 
 gained by methods of which he can confess only 
 humble ignorance; and beyond these visible 
 achievements lies a whole region of intellectual 
 activity open to the man of science, but closed 
 and forever foreign to the investigator in other 
 kinds of ideas. I am bound to insist on the fact 
 that I have no foolish desire to belittle the hon- 
 ours of science in its practical applications, and 
 that I can in a way estimate its rewards as an 
 abstract study, however far the full fruition of 
 the scientific life may lie beyond my reach. 
 
 Positive science, thus defined as that trained 
 observation which brings the vision of order out 
 of disorder, system out of chaos, law out of 
 cliance, might seem splendid enough in theory 
 and useful enough in practice to satisfy the most 
 exorbitant ambition. But it must be remem- 
 bered that a law of science, however wide its
 
 HUXLEY 195 
 
 scope, does not go beyond a statenient of the re- 
 lation of observed facts and tells us not a word of 
 what lies behind this relationship or of the cause 
 of these facts. Now the mind of man is so con- 
 stituted that this ignorance of causes is to it a 
 constant source of irritation; we are almost re- 
 sistlessly tempted to pass beyond the mere state- 
 ment of law to erecting a theory of the reality 
 that underlies the law. Such a theory is an hy- 
 pothesis, and such activity of the mind is hypo- 
 thetical science as distinguished from positive 
 science. But we must distinguish further. The 
 word hypothesis is used, by the man of science 
 as well as by the layman, in two quite different 
 senses. On the one hand, it may mean the at- 
 tempt to express in language borrowed from our 
 sensuous experience the nature of a cause or 
 reality which transcends such experience. Thus 
 the luminiferous ether is properly an hypothesis : 
 by its very definition it transcends the reach of 
 our perceptive faculties; we cannot see it, or feel 
 it in any way ; yet it is, or was, assumed to exist as 
 the cause of known phenomena and its properties 
 were given in terms of density, elasticity, etc., 
 which are appropriate to material things which 
 we can see and feel. On the other hand, the word 
 hypothesis is often taken to signify merely a 
 scientific law which belongs to the realm of posi- 
 tive science, but which is still to be established. 
 Confusion would be avoided if we employed the
 
 ige THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 term scientific conjecture for this second, and 
 proper, procedure, and confined the use of the 
 term hypothesis to the former, and as I think im- 
 proper, procedure. To make clear these distinc- 
 tions let me give an illustration or two. The for- 
 mula of gravitation merely states the regularity 
 of a certain group of known phenomena from the 
 motion of a falling apple to the motion of the 
 planets about the sun. When this formula first 
 dawned on the mind of Newton, it was a scien- 
 tific conjecture; when it was tested and proved 
 to conform to facts, it became an accepted scien- 
 tific law. Both conjecture and accepted law are 
 strictly within the field of positive science. But 
 if Newton, not content with generalizing the 
 phenomena of gravitation in the form of a law, 
 had undertaken to theorize on the absolute nature 
 of the attraction which caused the phenomena 
 of gravitation,^ he would have passed from the 
 sphere of positive science to that of hypothet- 
 ical science. So when Darwin, by systematiz- 
 ing the vast body of observations in biology and 
 geology, showed that plants and animals develop 
 in time and with the changes of the earth from 
 the simplest forms of animate existence to the 
 most complex forms now seen, and thus gave 
 precision to the law of evolution, he was working 
 in the field of positive science: he changed what 
 had been a conjectured law to a generally ac- 
 
 * On this point compare Berkeley, Siris, §§ 245-250.
 
 HUXLEY 197 
 
 cepted law. But when he went a step further 
 and undertook to explain the cause of this evo- 
 lution by the theory of natural selection or the 
 survival of the fit, he passed from positive to 
 hypothetical science. 
 
 In my essay on Newman I found it convenient 
 to classify the minds of men figuratively in an 
 inner and an outer group. In the outer group 
 I placed the two extremes of the mystic and the 
 sceptic, and in the inner group the non-mystical 
 religious mind and the non-sceptical scientific 
 mind. These two classes of the inner group differ 
 in their field of interest, the one being concerned 
 with the observation of spiritual states, the other 
 with the observation of material phenomena; 
 but they agree in so far as the former passes 
 from the facts of his spiritual consciousness to the 
 belief in certain causes conceived as mytholog- 
 ical beings and known by revelation, while the 
 latter passes from the facts of his material obser- 
 vations to the belief in certain causes conceived 
 as hypotheses and known by inference. Hypo- 
 theses, in other words, are merely the mythology, 
 tl[\e~3^eus ex machina, of science, and they are 
 eradicated from the scientific mind only by the 
 severest discipline of scepticism, just as mytho- 
 logy is eradicated from the religious mind by gen- 
 uine mysticism. I am aware of the danger of in- 
 culcating such an eradication. As for most men 
 to take away the belief in their gods as known
 
 igS THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 realities would be to put an end to their religion, 
 so, it may be objected, to take away these hy- 
 potheses would be to endanger the very founda- 
 tions of science. Yet, even if scientific hypo- 
 theses, in consideration of human frailty, may 
 have their use just as mythologies have their 
 use, I still protest that they are not necessary 
 to scientific discovery, as is proved by the great 
 example of Newton. I believe, though my tem- 
 erity may only be equalled by my ignorance, that 
 they have oftener introduced confusion into pure 
 science than they have aided in the discovery 
 of new laws or in the broadening of known laws ; 
 and I am confirmed in this belief by the present 
 state of biology. Darwin's law of evolution has 
 remained virtually unshaken and has, I suppose, 
 been the instigation of innumerable discoveries; 
 but, so far as I may judge from my limited read- 
 ing in the subject, Darwin's hypothesis of nat- 
 ural selection and the survival of the fit has on 
 the one hand been seriously and widely ques- 
 tioned as a cause sufficient to account for evolu- 
 tion, and on the other hand has led to specula- 
 tion to find a substitute for it which in wildness 
 of theorizing and in audacity of credulousness 
 can only be likened to the intricacies of religious 
 scholasticism. 
 
 The condemnation of hypothetical science as 
 d_angerous to integrity of mind is no new thing. 
 Even in the seventeenth century Joseph Glan-
 
 HUXLEY 199 
 
 vill saw how surely the enthusiasm engendered 
 by the foundation of the Royal Society would 
 lead to vain hypotheses. In his Scepsis Scien- 
 tifica he sets forth their nature and forestalls 
 Hume's destructive analysis of our notion of 
 causality, with strong warning that the man of 
 science should not "build the Castle of his intel- 
 lectual security, in the Air of Opinions. . . . Opin- 
 ions [he adds, meaning hypotheses] are the Rat- 
 tles of immature intellects. . . . Dogmatizing is the 
 great disturber both of our selves and the world 
 without us." In the next age Bolingbroke, in his 
 Essays Addressed to Mr. Pope, argued the question 
 of the limits of human knowledge and the fallacies 
 of hypothetical theorizing with a clearness and 
 penetration which would have made that work 
 one of the bulwarks of English philosophy, were 
 it not for my Lord's disdain of the rules of com- 
 position and the tediousness of his endless repe- 
 titions, and were it not above all for his own 
 inconsistency in urging the most colossal of all 
 hypotheses, that of universal optimism. In parti- 
 cular he takes up, more than once, the common 
 plea that hypotheses are useful, whether true or 
 not. 
 
 It will be urged, perhaps, as decisive in favor of 
 hypotheses [he observes], that they may be of service, 
 and can be of no disservice to us, in our pursuit of know- 
 ledge. An hypothesis founded on mere arbitrary assump- 
 tions will be a true hypothesis, and therefore of service
 
 200 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 to philosophy, if it is confirmed by many observations 
 afterwards, and if no one phaenomenon stand in oppo- 
 sition to it. An hypothesis that appears inconsistent 
 with the pha^nomena will be soon demonstrated false, and 
 as soon rejected. 
 
 In reply he shows by example how hypotheses 
 have kept men from the right path of investiga- 
 tion and how they have been maintained (what 
 rich and even ridiculous examples he might have 
 produced from our age) after they have been 
 proved inconsistent with facts and common 
 sense. "The fautors of hypotheses would have 
 us believe that even the detection of their false- 
 hood gives occasion to our improvement in 
 knowledge. But the road to truth does not lie 
 through the precincts of error." Now, it is true 
 that neither Glanvill nor Bolingbroke distin- 
 guished between the legitimate use of scientific 
 conjecture and the illegitimate use of hypotheses, 
 but they had chiefly in mind, I think, not the 
 mere formulation of law but the attempt to 
 penetrate into ultimate causes. 
 
 The chief fault of hypotheses, however, lies not 
 in the entanglement of pure science among peril- 
 ous ways and in the lifting up of the scientific im- 
 agination to idolatrous worship, as it were, of the 
 chimcBra bombinans in vacuo, but in the almost 
 irresistible tendency of the human mind to glide 
 from hypothetical science into what I have called 
 philosophical science, meaning thereby the en-
 
 HUXLEY 201 
 
 deavour to formulate a philosophy of life out of 
 scientific law and hypothesis. An hypothesis may 
 be proclaimed by the man of science as a purely 
 subjective formula for a group of phenomena, 
 and as a confessedly temporary expedient for ad- 
 vancing a little further in the process of bringing 
 our observations under the regularity of law; the 
 man of science may pretend verbally to a purely 
 sceptical attitude towards his transcendental 
 definitions, but in practice this scepticism almost 
 invariably gives way to a feeling that the formula 
 for causes is as real objectively as the law of phe- 
 nomena which it undertakes to explain, and to 
 a kind of supercilious intolerance for those who 
 maintain the sceptical attitude practically as well 
 as verbally, or for those who build their faith on 
 hypotheses of another sort than his own. Hence 
 the hostility that has constantly existed between 
 those who base their philosophy of life on intui- 
 tion and the humanities and those who base it 
 upon scientific law and hypothesis. At the very 
 beginning of the modern scientific movement 
 this antagonism made itself felt, and, as religion 
 had then the stronger position in society, took 
 the form of apologetics on the part of science. 
 In what may be called the authorized History 
 of the Royal Society, Bishop Sprat undertook 
 to allay the suspicions that had immediately 
 arisen against the chartered organization of ex- 
 perimental science. With specious sophistry he
 
 202 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 argued that the "new philosophy" would never 
 encroach on the established system of education 
 in the humanities. He admitted the natural alli- 
 ance between science and industry against the 
 feudal form of government, but asserted that 
 science in this was only a handmaid of the times. 
 
 Nor ought our Gentry [he declares] to be averse from 
 the promoting of Trade, out of any little Jealousy, that 
 thereby they shall debase themselves, and corrupt their 
 Blood : For they are to know, that Trafic and Commerce 
 have given Mankind a higher Degree than any Title of 
 Nobility, even that of Civility and Humanity itself. And 
 at this time especially above all others, they have no 
 reason to despise Trade as below them, when it has so 
 great an influence on the very Government of the World. 
 In former Ages indeed this was not so remarkable. 
 
 Primarily, however. Sprat, as a prelate in good 
 standing, contended that religion stood in no 
 danger from the deductions of the new phil- 
 osophy : 
 
 I do here, in the beginning, most sincerely declare, 
 that if this Design [of the Royal Society] should in the 
 least diminish the Reverence, that is due to the Doctrine 
 of Jesus Christ, it were so far from deserving Protection, 
 that it ought to be abhorr'd by all the Politic and Pru- 
 dent ; as well as by the devout Part of Christendom. . . . 
 With these Apprehensions I come to examine the Objec- 
 tions, which I am now to satisfy: and having calmly 
 compar'd the Arguments of some devout Men against 
 Knowledge, and chiefly that of Experiments ; I must pro- 
 nounce them both, to be altogether inoffensive. I did 
 before affirm, that the Royal Society is abundantly cau-
 
 HUXLEY 203 
 
 tious, not to intermeddle In Spiritual Things. ... So 
 true is that Saying of my Lord Bacon, That by a little 
 Knowledge of Nature Men become Atheists; but a great deal 
 returns them back again to a sound and religious Mind. In 
 brief, if we rightly apprehend the Matter, it will be 
 found that it is not only Sottishness, but Prophaness, 
 for Men to cry out against the understanding of Nature; 
 for that being nothing else but the Instrument of God, 
 whereby he gives Being and Action to Things: the 
 Knowledge of it deserves so little to be esteem'd impious, 
 that it ought rather to be reckon 'd as Divine. 
 
 It may seem a little illogical in the good Bishop 
 first to apologize for science as having no finger in 
 Spiritual Things and then to exalt it as a bulwark 
 against atheism, but such an inconsistency is 
 very human, and it is an example _pf the almost 
 irresistible tendency of the mind to use its own 
 specific form of knowledge as a criterion of all 
 knowledge. The vacillation between apology and 
 presumption introduced by the historian of the 
 Royal Society has persisted to this day, and in 
 essay after essay of Huxley's you will find the 
 modern president of the Society maintaining on 
 one page the self-limitations of positive science 
 and on another page passing from hypothesis to 
 a dogmatic philosophy, here rebuking those who 
 confound the domains of scientific and spiritual 
 law and there proclaiming science as a support 
 of what he deems true religion. Much that he 
 wrote was directed to temporary questions, and 
 to open his volumes may seem even now to
 
 204 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 breathe the dust of battles fought long ago and 
 rendered meaningless by the advance of time; 
 but in reality, though their outer form may 
 change, the disputes in which he engaged have 
 not yet been settled as he so fondly believed 
 they were, and can never be settled unless a 
 sullen apathy be taken for assent. 
 
 Certainly Huxley, looking back from his quiet 
 retirement at Eastbourne over his long and bel- 
 ligerent career, might be justified in thinking that 
 victory was altogether the reward of his laborious 
 life. He had had no other regular instruction 
 than what he received for a couple of years in the 
 semi-public school at Ealing of which his father 
 was assistant master, and what he gained from 
 lectures in Sydenham College, London, and at 
 Charing Cross Hospital. In 1846, at the age of 
 twenty-one, he was appointed surgeon to H.M.S. 
 Rattlesnake which was bound for a long surveying 
 cruise in the Torres Straits. After four years in 
 the Far East he returned to England, with a large 
 experience in zoological and ethnological work, 
 and with no immediate prospects of advance- 
 ment. His first experience in London was embit- 
 tered by governmental delays and neglect, but in 
 1 85 1 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Soci- 
 ety, receiving the Gold Medal the next year, and 
 in 1854 he was appointed professor of natural 
 history at the School of Mines. After that hon- 
 ours and offers came to him in rapid succession.
 
 HUXLEY 205 
 
 He could not be tempted to leave London, where 
 he felt himself at the centre of things, but in 1872 
 he accepted the position of Lord Rector of Aber- 
 deen University, since this office afforded him an 
 opportunity of exerting an influence on national 
 education without giving up his residence in the 
 capital. In 1883 he was chosen president of the 
 Royal Society, and in 1892, in lieu of a title which 
 he would not accept, he was raised to the Privy 
 Council. It is not insignificant of his position in 
 England that, on the occasion of kissing hands 
 with the other Councillors at Osborne, when he 
 snatched an opportunity for obtaining a close 
 view of the Queen, he found Her Majesty's eyes 
 fixed upon himself with the same inquisitiveness. 
 But the most sensible triumphs were no doubt 
 those that came to him in public as the recognized 
 spokesman of the new philosophy, and of these, 
 two of a personal sort, gained at Oxford, the very 
 citadel of the forces leagued against him, must 
 have been peculiarly sweet. Every one knows of 
 his famous tilt with Wilberforce at the meeting 
 of the British Association at Oxford in i860. It 
 was just after the publication of The Origin of 
 Species, and the Bishop of Oxford thought it a 
 proper occasion to demolish the rising heresy 
 with argument and ridicule. The lecture-room 
 was crowded, the clergy being massed in the cen- 
 tre of the audience, and the very windows being 
 packed with ladies who encouraged the champion
 
 2o6 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 of religion with their fluttering handkerchiefs. 
 The Bishop spoke for an hour, assuring his hear- 
 ers that there was nothing in the idea of evolution, 
 and then, turning "with a smiUng insolence" to 
 Huxley who was sitting on the platform, "begged 
 to know, was it through his grandfather or his 
 grandmother that he claimed his descent from a 
 monkey." At this Huxley is said to have struck 
 his hand upon his knee, and to have exclaimed to 
 his neighbour, "The Lord hath delivered him 
 into mine hands." Then, as the event was de- 
 scribed in Macmillan's Magazine, he "slowly and 
 deliberately arose. A slight, tall figure, stern and 
 pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before 
 us and spoke those tremendous words — words 
 which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, 
 could remember just after they were spoken, for 
 their meaning took away our breath, though it 
 left us in no doubt as to what it was." According 
 to Huxley's son and biographer the most accur- 
 ate report of the concluding words is in a letter 
 of John Richard Green : 
 
 I asserted — and I repeat — that a man has no rea- 
 son to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. 
 If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in 
 recalling it would rather be a man — a man of restless 
 and versatile intellect — who, not content with an 
 equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges 
 into scientific questions with which he has no real 
 acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhet- 
 oric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the
 
 HUXLEY 207 
 
 real point at Issue by eloquent digressions and skilled 
 appeals to religious prejudice. 
 
 Again, at another meeting of the British Asso- 
 ciation at Oxford, in 1894, Huxley appeared as a 
 champion of Darwinism against the insinuations 
 of Lord Salisbury, who, in his speech as president, 
 spoke with delicate irony "of the 'comforting 
 word, evolution,' and, passing to the Weisman- 
 nian controversy, implied that the diametrically 
 opposed views so frequently expressed nowadays 
 threw the whole process of evolution into 
 doubt." ^ But things were not what they had 
 been. The ready and vociferous applause was for 
 the prophet of Darwinism, and Huxley, instead 
 of repelling sarcasm with invective, now con- 
 scious of his triumphant position and of the cour- 
 tesy due to one who as Prime Minister had only 
 two years before honoured him with the Privy 
 Councillorship, was compelled to veil "an unmis- 
 takable and vigorous protest in the most gracious 
 and dignified speech of thanks." It was his last 
 public appearance on any important occasion, a 
 proper and almost majestic conclusion to his long 
 warfare. He died on June 29 of the following year, 
 having just completed his threescore and ten. 
 By his direction three lines from a poem by his 
 wife were inscribed on his tomb-stone: 
 
 ' Professor H. F. Osbom in Transactions of the N. Y. Acad. Sci., 
 vol. XV.
 
 2o8 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep; 
 For still He giveth His beloved sleep, 
 And if an endless sleep He wills, so best. 
 
 Better, if he could have known them, would have 
 been the words spoken only the other day by the 
 Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge at the great dinner 
 given at the university on the occasion of Dar- 
 win's centenary: 
 
 I claim as a theologian — and I see representatives of 
 law, music, and letters, and many other sciences and arts 
 present — that only one spirit animates us all, and I 
 should beg that we might be included in the term 
 "naturalists." 
 
 Now to Huxley more than to any other one man 
 in England is due this victory, seeming to some 
 so complete and final ; he more than any other one 
 man stood in the nineteenth century for the triple 
 power of positive and hypothetical science and of 
 philosophical science in the form of naturalism. 
 Of his work in positive science I am incompetent 
 to speak, but I can at least say that it was im- 
 portant enough to give him honourable standing 
 among investigators and to clothe his popular 
 utterances with authority. His great opportun- 
 ity came with the publication of The Origin of 
 Species when he was thirty-four years old, and for 
 the remaining thirty-six years of his life he was 
 the valiant and aggressive champion of evolution 
 and the Darwinian hypothesis against all comers, 
 whether they were mighty men of the Church or
 
 HUXLEY 209 
 
 of Parliament. He was, so to speak, the Plato to 
 the Socrates of the new philosophy, applying its 
 premisses to every department of life. His power 
 in this field was conditioned by his knowledge of 
 science and of philosophy, but it depended also 
 on his consummate skill in the use of language. 
 To read his essays, which deal so magnificently 
 with old disputes and forgotten animosities, is to 
 feel — at least a literary man may be pardoned 
 for so feeling — that here is one of the cunning 
 artificers lost to letters, an essayist who, if he had 
 devoted his faculties to the more permanent 
 aspect of truth, might have taken a place among 
 the great masters of literature. Certainly in sar- 
 casm and irony he had no superior, unless it 
 was Matthew Arnold, whom, indeed, he in 
 many superficial respects resembles. He had, 
 no doubt, easy material in the bishops, and the 
 epithet episcopophagous , which he pleasantly 
 coined for himself, tells the story of that contest 
 in a word. Better material yet was afforded by 
 Gladstone when, rushing in where bishops feared 
 to tread, he undertook to uphold the cosmogony 
 of Genesis as scientifically correct. Whatever 
 one's attitude towards philosophical science may 
 be, one can acknowledge a feeling of unreserved 
 glee in seeing that flabby, pretentious intellect 
 pricked and slashed in such masterly fashion. 
 Satire like the following is never old: 
 
 In particular, the remarkable disquisition which
 
 210 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 covers pages ii to 14 of Mr. Gladstone's last contribu- 
 tion [to the Nineteenth Century, January, 1886] has 
 greatly exercised my mind. Socrates is reported to have 
 said of the works of HeracHtus that he who attempted to 
 comprehend them should be a " Delian swimmer," but 
 that, for his part, what he could understand was so good 
 that he was disposed to believe in the excellence of that 
 which he found unintelligible. In endeavouring to make 
 myself master of Mr. Gladstone's meaning in these 
 pages, I have often been overcome by a feeling analog- 
 ous to that of Socrates, but not quite the same. That 
 which I do understand has appeared to me so very much 
 the reverse of good, that I have sometimes permitted 
 myself to doubt the value of that which I do not under- 
 stand. 
 
 That is the true joy of battle, that keeps the 
 wrangling of ancient days forever young: 
 
 Full of the god that urged their burning breast, 
 The heroes thus their mutual warmth express'd. 
 
 In the case of Huxley himself there is no ques- 
 tion of what we understand and what we do not 
 understand. All in his writing is of that pecu- 
 liarly lucid quality which is an argument in itself, 
 for we are prone to accept the canon that what is 
 clear must be true. Yet there is a distinction. 
 Though, so far as regards the end immediately in 
 ' view, Huxley is always a master of logical pre- 
 cision, one discovers, in reading him largely, that 
 his ends are not always the same, and that in the 
 total effect of his works there lies concealed an 
 insoluble ambiguity. So it is that, though in one
 
 HUXLEY 211 
 
 sense his strongest intellectual trait was, as his 
 son says, "an uncompromising passion for truth," 
 yet in the sum of his thinking he was one of the 
 master sophists of the age. And the tracks of 
 his sophistry lead straight to that confusion of 
 positive science and hypothetical science and 
 philosophical science which is, perhaps, the most 
 characteristic mark of the last century. 
 
 Agnosticism, according to Huxley's own de- 
 finition of the word which he invented to sum up 
 his intellectual procedure, is neither scepticism 
 nor dogmatism; it "is not properly described as 
 a 'negative' creed, nor indeed as a creed of any 
 kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute 
 faith in the validity of a principle, which is as 
 much ethical as intellectual, . . . that it is wrong 
 for a man to say that he is certain of the object- 
 ive truth of any proposition unless he can pro- 
 duce evidence which logically justifies that cer- 
 tainty." Agnosticism, then, is merely the honest 
 adherence to evidence. Now no state of mind could 
 be more exemplary than that of the agnostic when 
 so defined. It has only one weakness, that, if we 
 could accept their own opinion, it includes all 
 men, and so defines nothing. Huxley, indeed, 
 contrasts the procedure of the agnostic with 
 theology, and declares that "agnosticism can be 
 said to be a stage in its evolution, only as death 
 may be said to be the final stage in the evolution 
 of life." Really, the whole argument, for one so
 
 / 
 
 / 
 
 212 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 keen as Huxley, is rather naive. Does he sup- 
 pose that Cardinal Newman, for instance, would 
 admit that his theological hypothesis was any 
 less supported by evidence than the evolutionary 
 hypothesis? As a matter of fact Newman might 
 retort that he had with him the evidence of ages, 
 whereas Huxley was depending at bottom on the 
 evidence of only a few decades of time. The 
 difference between them does not lie in their 
 loyalty or disloyalty to evidence per se, but in 
 the kind of evidence from which they start ; nor 
 has Huxley, so far as I know, ever shown, or 
 even seriously tried to show, that the inner 
 evidence which gives us the sense of moral lib- 
 
 Ierty and responsibility, of sin and holiness, is 
 less logically trustworthy than the evidence of 
 the eye and the ear. 
 
 That is the weakness of agnosticism as defined 
 by its inventor, but it has a compensating ad- 
 vantage. As actually used by him it is at once 
 a sword of offence and a buckler of safety ; per- 
 mitting the most truculent dogmatism when the 
 errors of an enemy are to be exposed and the 
 most elusive scepticism when the enemy charges 
 in return. Indeed, an agnostic might briefly and 
 not unfairly be defined as a dogmatist in attack 
 and a sceptic in defence, which is but another 
 way of calling him a sophist. With what dexter- 
 ity Huxley wielded this double weapon may be 
 seen in his use of the great question of scientific 

 
 HUXLEY 213 
 
 law. More than once {e.g., Science and Christian 
 Tradition, p. 134), when certain deductions from 
 the rigid appHcation of law are brought home to 
 him, he takes refuge in a sceptical limitation of 
 law to the mere formulation of objective exper- 
 ience in a world which is ultimately moved by 
 forces beyond the reach of man's perceptive 
 faculties. And against the preacher who rashly 
 invades the scientific field he can declare that 
 "the habitual use of the word 'law,' in the sense 
 of an active thing, is almost a mark of pseudo- 
 science; it characterizes the writings of those who 
 have appropriated the forms of science without 
 knowing anything of its substance." Yet in the 
 same essay, when he opens the attack upon those 
 who would retreat into a region beyond scientific 
 law, he avows boldly "the fundamental axiom of 
 scientific thought," "that there is not, never 
 has been, and never will be, any disorder in na- 
 ture. The admission of the occurrence of any 
 event which was hot the logical consequence of 
 the immediately antecedent events, according to 
 these definite, ascertained, or unascertained rules 
 which we call the 'laws of nature,' would be an 
 act of self-destruction on the part of science." 
 And elsewhere: "We ignore, even as a possibihty, 
 the notion of any interference with the order of 
 Nature." Now when we consider that to regard' 
 the act of the will which originates the motion of 
 raising the arm as a force in any way contrary to
 
 214 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 the law of gravitation, is in Huxley's mind an 
 unscientific absurdity {Pseudo-Scientific Realism, 
 passim), that, in other words, Hfe and the world 
 are to him a pure mechanism, and when we con- 
 sider further that he identifies the claims of sci- 
 ence with the desire of truth {Universities: Actual 
 and Ideal, passim), it really should not have 
 seemed to him so grave an error to use the word 
 law for that force which produces the absolute 
 uniformity defined by law. It is Huxley himself 
 in these moments of attack who virtually, if not 
 literally, takes law "in the sense of an active 
 thing," which in his moments of defence he so 
 vigorously repudiates. 
 
 Inevitably this ambiguity of attitude becomes 
 even more perplexed when heap plics the notion 
 of scientific law to the deeper problems of li.fe. 
 In one place, for Instance, he asserts that "there 
 lies in the nature of things a reason for every 
 moral law, as cogent and as well defined as that 
 which underlies every physical law." But in an- 
 other place he takes what, from his principles, 
 must be regarded as the opposite point of view: 
 "The notion that the doctrine of evolution can 
 furnish a foundation for morals seems to me to be 
 an illusion"; and again he states roundly that 
 "cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the 
 headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature." 
 This ambiguity of his position involves not only 
 morals but the fundamental question of spirit-
 
 HUXLEY 215 
 
 uality and materialism. In his freer moments of 
 attack he does not hesitate to fling out the most 
 relentless dogmas of materialism. The actuality 
 of the spiritual world, he declares in one of his 
 prefaces, lies entirely within the province of 
 science — that is to say, is amenable to the 
 undeviating operation of mechanical law; "the 
 materials of consciousness are products of cere- 
 bral activity," and are "the result of molecular 
 forces"; "we are," by an extension of the Car- 
 tesian theory of the lower animals, "conscious 
 automata, . . . parts of the great series of causes 
 and effects which, in unbroken continuity, com- 
 poses that which is, and has been, and shall be — 
 the sum of existence." That should seem to be the 
 most explicit materialism and necessitarianism; 
 yet hear the same man on the other side! "For 
 my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematize 
 the intruder [this same necessitarianism]. Fact 
 I know; and Law I know; but what is Necessity, 
 save an empty shadow of my own mind's throw- 
 ing?" In other words, when your enemy talks 
 loosely of miracles and spiritual experiences and 
 supernatural freedom, it is easy to crush him with 
 this bludgeon of an unbroken law of mechanical 
 cause and effect ; but when your enemy turns on 
 you and begins to draw disagreeable conclusions 
 from this fatal sequence, it is the part of the skil- 
 ful fencer to denounce as an empty shadow any 
 connection between such a law and necessity!
 
 2i6 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Further than that, Huxley when hard pressed, 
 instead of abiding manfully by his premisses, 
 was ready to sink into that last sophistry of the 
 scientific mind and deny that there is any 
 distinction between the materialistic and the 
 spiritualistic conception of life. " In itself," he 
 says, "it is of little moment whether we express 
 the phsenomena of matter in terms of spirit; or 
 the phenomena of spirit in terms of matter." 
 This view he buttresses {Science and Alorals) by 
 calmly assuming that St. Augustine and Calvin 
 were at one with him in holding to a fatal deter- 
 mination. Is it necessary to say that St. Augus- 
 tine and Calvin — whether rightly or wrongly 
 is here not the question — believed in a spirit- 
 ual power apart from and undetermined by 
 natural law? This power might have its own de- 
 terminism, but, relatively to natural law, it was 
 spontaneous and incalculable. The difference 
 to philosophy and conduct between holding a 
 spiritual fatalism and holding a mechanical de- 
 terminism marks the distance between religion 
 and science — or, at least, between the posi- 
 tions of the English bishops and of Huxley. If 
 there is no distinction here, why then all the 
 pother, and what meaning is there in Huxley's 
 cheerful assumption that science was to be the 
 end of the Church and that men of science were 
 to supplant the bishops?
 
 HUXLEY 217 
 
 Now these inconsistencies in Huxley are not 
 the result of a progressive change in his views, nor 
 are they infrequent or superficial. They lie at the 
 very foundation of the system of which he was 
 the most distinguished spokesman, and they are 
 more conspicuous in him than in others merely 
 because at any given moment his style is so em- 
 inently transparent. They spring, indeed, from 
 a false extension of the procedure of science into a 
 philosophy of naturalism. The fact is simply this : 
 When the matter is squarely faced there can be no 
 science, properly speaking, except in so far as the 
 world appears to us a strictly closed mechanical 
 system, a "block-universe" as William James 
 called it, which contains its end in its beginning 
 and displays the whole in every part. As it has 
 been picturesquely expressed: "Were a single 
 dust-atom destroyed, the universe would col- 
 lapse." Absolute regularity is the sine qua non of 
 scientific law, and the moment any element of in- 
 calculable spontaneity is admitted into the sys- 
 tem, that moment the possibility of scientific law 
 is so far excluded : there is no la w of the individual 
 "or the unpredictable; there is no science of the 
 soul unless man, as Taine says, is no more than 
 "a very simple mechanism which analysis can 
 take to pieces like clockwork." This does not 
 mean that any given law is final and embraces the 
 whole content of phenomena; but it does mean 
 that further knowledge, while it may modify a
 
 2i8 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 law or supplant one law by another, still leaves us 
 within the realm of absolute mechanical regu- 
 larity. Such a closed system is properly called 
 nature; it was clearly conceived and given to 
 philosophy by the great naturalists of the seven- 
 teenth century. 
 
 Nature, thus conceived as a block-system, is 
 the proper field of positive science, and leads to 
 no embarrassment so long as we do not attempt 
 anything more than the classification of physical 
 phenomena under laws. But there is a tendency 
 in the human mind which draws it almost irre- 
 sistibly to pass from the formulation of laws to 
 the definition of the force or cause underlying 
 them. This is hypothetical science. Such a pro- 
 cedure already involves a certain violence to 
 scientific evidence, but it does not stop here. 
 Suppose there exists a body of testimony, accum- 
 ulated through thousands of years, to the effect 
 that a whole world of our inner life lies outside of 
 that block-universe of mechanical determinism: 
 what then is the man of hypothetical science to 
 do ? He may deny the validity of any evidence 
 apart from that which leads to scientific law, and 
 having erected this law of mechanical regularity 
 into an active cause governing and controlling 
 the world, he may set it in opposition to the 
 hypothesis of a personal God which Christians 
 have created from the evidence of their inner 
 experience. He may be onesided, but he will be
 
 HUXLEY 219 
 
 consistent. In this sense, and with a consequence 
 different from what he intended, Frederic Harri- 
 son was justified in saying that " agnosticism as 
 a religious philosophy per se rests on an almost 
 total ignoring of history and social evolution." 
 But suppose further that our scholar, having 
 naturally broad interests and sympathies, is still 
 importuned by all that evidence in the moral and 
 political spheres which he could not bring into 
 conformity with his hypothesis: what will he do? 
 In attempting to cling to an hypothesis which is 
 based on the exclusion of half the evidence of 
 life, while at the same time he feels the appeal 
 of the whole range of evidence, he will try to de- 
 velop that hypothesis into a complete philosophy 
 of life, and in doing so he will necessarily fall into 
 just those inconsistencies which strike us over 
 and over again in Huxley. He will become a vic- 
 tim of that huge self-contradiction which I have 
 called philosophical science. 
 
 Now we all know how completely this sophism 
 took possession of England and the world about 
 the middle of the last century. In particular the 
 magnitude of Darwin's work in the field of positive 
 science and the superb simplicity of his explana- 
 tion of the whole order of existence, including 
 man, as the product of a mechanical law of selec- 
 tion, easily imposed the evolutionary hypothesis 
 as a lawgiver upon education and morals and relig- 
 ion and government. And to the authority of
 
 220 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 Darwin was added the persuasiveness of Huxley's 
 masterly skill as lecturer and writer. It seemed to 
 the men who heard his voice as if the long ob- 
 scurity that had involved human destiny was to 
 be rolled away, as if at last the pathway of truth 
 had been found, and the world's great age was 
 about to be renewed. And however we may now 
 see the inconsistencies and feel what in another 
 man might be called the duplicity that underlay 
 Huxley's method of attack and defence, there 
 was enough of the stuff of positive science in his 
 doctrine to give it a certain moral stiflfness and 
 intellectual rigour which must always claim our 
 admiration. But with the passage of years a 
 change has come upon philosophical science. The 
 human mind could not long rest content with a 
 system which was so glaringly at war with itself, 
 and indeed there are signs that Huxley himself 
 was not always satisfied with his position. But 
 where lay the way of escape ? These men would 
 not willingly give up the authority which seemed 
 to be derived from the actualities of positive sci- 
 ence, yet they began to see that the hypothesis of 
 a block-universe had brought them to an abso- 
 lute impasse. The history of the intellect since 
 the days of Darwin's supremacy, therefore, has 
 been marked by an attempt to preserve the facts 
 of evolution as the basis of a scientific philosophy, 
 but to alter the evolutionary hypothesis so as to 
 bring it into harmony with the spontaneous part
 
 HUXLEY 221 
 
 of human nature. The process has widened the 
 distance between positive science and philosoph- 
 ical science; it has introduced a new set of incon- 
 sistencies, not to say absurdities, into thought, 
 but it is extremely interesting for the way in 
 which it has finally brought together two currents 
 of the nineteenth century that might have seemed 
 to a superficial observer the very opposites of each 
 other. What appeared in Huxley's time, and still 
 more in the half-century preceding him, to be the 
 very bulwark against those laxer principles and 
 tendencies which may be grouped together as ro- 
 mantic, has gradually thrown off its hard ration- 
 alism, until now in our day philosophical science 
 and romanticism are actually merging together 
 and becoming almost indistinguishable. In place 
 of Huxley we have William James and Bergson. 
 The change is significant and worthy of analysis, 
 for the true meaning of a movement is known by 
 its end. So much we may learn from Pragma- 
 tism, even while criticizing it. 
 
 ^or is it difficult, if we regard the material and 
 moral forces from which science and romanti- 
 cism respectively take their start, to see how these 
 twoapparent enemies have come to join hands in 
 aTtruce if not in an alliance. We do not often 
 stop to reflect on the world of pain and horror 
 which underlies this surface of things on which we 
 move so comfortably. Only now and then some 
 accident, some physical rebellion as it might be
 
 222 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 called, sets loose the pent-up daemonic powers, and 
 for a moment life is as it would be if in a mad- 
 house the phrensied patients were to break their 
 fetters and overcome their keepers. Each force 
 of nature in itself seems to be limitless in its po- 
 tential activity, and in so far as it is unchecked 
 or unbalanced by some other force becomes the 
 source of ruin to mankind. Manifestly that or- 
 derly subordination which is the condition of our 
 physical well-being depends on some principle of 
 control and balance which is not inherent in the 
 individual forces of nature. Furthermore, if our 
 horror at these calamities, if the physical repug- 
 nance that lies always concealed in our breast, 
 have any meaning, it is in the testimony they 
 bear to a certain correspondence on the one hand 
 between our sense of moral evil and the destruc- 
 tive limitlessness of any natural force in itself, 
 and on the other hand between our sense of moral 
 justice and the imposition of order and subordi- 
 nation upon those forces. We are thrust by our 
 emotions into an absolute dualism. Now the point 
 to consider is that pure science deals with these 
 forces in themselves and as unlimited, and with- 
 out any thought of such human distinctions. A 
 little spark kindles a fire, and instantly the flames 
 sweep over a city, consuming life and property 
 and spreading everywhere destruction and terror. 
 Yet with this terror science has nothing to do; it 
 is concerned with the laws of heat. Again some
 
 HUXLEY 223 
 
 movement takes place within the earth; the 
 crust on which we walk is rent and shaken, and 
 the helpless human creatures are killed and muti- 
 lated as ruthlessly as the ants in their little 
 mound over which we inadvertently stumble. 
 Yet with this hideous fear science has nothing to 
 do; it is concerned with the laws of motion. Nor 
 is the human body itself free from these incur- 
 sions of uncontrolled energy. One very close to 
 us, one whose fragile beauty has filled us with a 
 long apprehension of love, is seized by a loath- 
 some disease; those lower forms of life which to 
 our vanity we seem to have trampled down in 
 our progress have suddenly risen up like aveng- 
 ing furies and laid their obscene grip on what was 
 dearest and fairest to us. We look on in an agony 
 of suspense, as if in this precious body the very 
 armies of good and evil were at war. Yet all the 
 while the physician watches with impassive, 
 critical eye, studying symptoms, applying reme- 
 dies, awaiting calmly the results: his very effi- 
 cacy as a man of science depends on his freedom 
 from those emotions which are tearing at our 
 heartstrings; he is concerned with the laws of 
 parasitic life. 
 
 Science is properly the servant of our emotions 
 and of the corresponding sense of dualism, but 
 in its method of work it not only ignores our emo- 
 tions, but can perform its true service only so 
 long as it ignores them and deals with the pure
 
 224 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 forces of nature. The error and danger arise 
 when it disdains to be a servant and sets itself up 
 as mistress, raising its means into an end and its 
 procedure into a philosophy. Moved by our im- 
 portunate consciousness of order and disorder, 
 yet bound in its hypothetical explanation of evo- 
 lution to consider the forces of nature alone, with- 
 out the admission of any law of control outside 
 ^of them, it has come gradually to a conception of 
 ^ I the world as an entity containing within itself 
 
 / some force of vitalism, some elan vital, which by 
 
 I its inherent limitlessness is the source of constant 
 creation, making the sum of things actually 
 greater to-day than it was yesterday and, from 
 
 I our human point of view, more orderly. Sheer 
 expansiveness becomes the law of physical life. 
 
 ^The acceptance of this hypothesis of an incal- 
 culable energy, whose action to-day can in no 
 wise, or only imperfectly, be predicted from its 
 action yesterday, might seem to evict the very 
 possibility of scientific law; but there are two 
 things to consider. In the first place this hypo- 
 thesis is just an hypothesis and has little or no 
 relation to the actual work of positive science. 
 And in the second place it seduces the scientific 
 mind by seeming to get rid altogether of that dual- 
 ism which is ignored in scientific procedure. As 
 a matter of fact it merely changes the character 
 of that dualism by setting the two terms apart 
 at the beginning and end of time instead of re-
 
 HUXLEY 
 
 garding them as existent together and independ- 
 ent of time.^ 
 
 From this rather slippery hypothesis of a uni-\ 
 verse in the process of continual self-expansion it 1 
 is but a step to the modern scientific philosophy 
 of human progress as depending, not on any 
 ideal outside of evolution, but as — what shall 
 I say? — as self-causative. Here precisely en- 
 ters the point of connection between philosoph- 
 ical science and romanticism f but to understand 
 its full meaning we must look back into the 
 sources of the second member of the alliance. 
 
 Now, in attempting to characterize the historic 
 romanticism of the nineteenth century, the first 
 trait that is forced upon our attention is the note 
 of rebellion from the classics. That hostility 
 between romanticism and classicism is funda- 
 mental: we cannot escape it. Greek philosophy, 
 as it touches upon human conduct and as it was 
 handed down to the modern world, was summed 
 
 » The middle term between the hypothesis of a purely mechanical 
 evolution and the hypothesis of evolution as conceived by Bergson may 
 be found in the evolutionary monism of Haeckel, which has been beauti- 
 fully analyzed and demolished by M. Emile Boutroux in his recent work. 
 La Science et la Religion dans la philosophie conlemporaine. 
 
 2 This union was clearly foreshadowed in Diderot; it was developed 
 by Comte; but its great authority could not come until after the work of 
 Darwin. In one of his essays Huxley speaks with scorn of Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison's Positivism, and asks: " What has Comtism to do with the 
 'New Philosophy' [i.e., the philosophy of science]?" Mr. Harrison 
 might easily have retorted. In fact when Huxley boasted that the 
 bishops were to be replaced by the " new school of the prophets [i.e., 
 men of science) " as " the only one that can work miracles," and when 
 he acknowledged that " the interests of science and industry are identi- 
 C?J," he was merely repeating Comte's early theory of the supplanting of 
 the priest and the soldier by the man of science and the man of business.
 
 226 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 up in the Nicomachean Ethics, Sit the very heart 
 of which lies the classical distinction between the 
 infinite, as the absolute, and the limitless. Ac- 
 cording to Aristotle the active nature of man is 
 made up of desires, or impulses {liTi.9vixLai) , which 
 in themselves are incapable of self-restraint and 
 therefore limitless (aTrctpos yap 17 t^s i-mdv/xLa^ ^I'o-t?, 
 Pol., II, 4; the translation of aTrttpos in Greek 
 generally as "infinite" instead of "limitless" 
 has been the source of endless confusion of 
 ideas). Furthermore this limitlessness is of the 
 very essence of evil, whereas good in itself may 
 be defined as a limit {t6 yap kokov tov airupov t6 8' 
 dyaOov tov Trf.iTipaa-p.ivov), and the aim of conduct 
 is to acquire that golden mean which is nothing 
 other than a certain bound set to the inherent 
 limitlessness of our impulsive or desiring nature. 
 The determination of this bound in each case 
 is the function of reason, which embraces the 
 whole existence of man as an organism in his 
 environment and says to each impulse as it 
 arises, thus far shalt thou go and no further. 
 But as the basis of practical life is the limitless 
 sway of unrelated impulses, reason, to establish 
 its balance and measure, to find, that is, its 
 norm of unity, must look ultimately to some 
 point quite outside of the realm of impulse and 
 nature. Hence the imposition of the theoretical 
 life, as Aristotle calls it, upon the practical — 
 the contemplation of that absolute ugjtXJ^jch
 
 HUXLEY 227 
 
 is unmoved amid all that moves. This unity I 
 not of nature is the infinite; it is the very op- I 
 posite of that limitlessness which is the attribute I 
 of nature itself; it is not a state of endless, inde- I 
 finite expansion, but is on the contrary that state f 
 of centralization which has its goal in itself 
 
 (Trap' avTr]v ovSevo's i(f>Le(T6ai, reXous). 
 
 The revolt from this essential dualism of classi- 
 cal philosophy began in the seventeenth century. 
 That age was notably a time of confused think- 
 ing and of reaching out in many directions. But 
 at its beginning, and always in the background, 
 lay a cert ain mode of regarding life, the orthodox 
 mode of supernaturalism. On the one side was 
 the great flux of nature, embracing in its endless 
 activity the heart of man and the phenomenal 
 world. "The sea itself," says Bossuet, "has not 
 more waves when it is agitated by the winds than 
 are the diverse thoughts that rise from this abyss 
 without bottom, from this impenetrable mystery 
 of the heart of man." Within this chaos of the 
 human breast sat reason as a kind of king or ar- 
 biter, by its command bringing order out of dis- 
 order. But reason itself, as understood by the 
 characteristic minds of the age, belonged to na- 
 ture, and was a sufficient guide only so long as it 
 listened to the voice of a restraining power above 
 and outside of nature. The true division was not 
 "between reason and instinct or desire, but be- 
 tween all these together, as forces of nature, and
 
 228 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 <f 
 
 ,tS 
 
 superrational insight. That is to say, the ortho- 
 dox view of the seventeenth century was the 
 classical dualism which had become involved 
 and obscured in a vast system of Christian 
 mythology and theology. The irremediable fault, 
 default one might say, of the age was that it 
 never attained to a clear and untrammelled de- 
 finition of the superrational insight upon which 
 its faith was based. Pascal, indeed, approached 
 such a definition when he set the heart over 
 against reason and concupiscence, meaning by 
 heart not so much the desires and emotions, as 
 the contrast with concupiscence plainly shows, 
 but that faculty by which we intuitively ap- 
 prehend the infinite and eternal. Yet even in 
 Pascal this faculty of intuition was never freed 
 from the bondage of revelation and question- 
 able authority, while in most of his religious 
 contemporaries it was inextricably confused with 
 some external voice of the Bible or the Church. 
 Not many men to-day have the patience to read 
 far in the endless theological literature of that 
 age; and with reason. |t is the curse of the Re- 
 formation that the search for truth was largely 
 diverted by it into a monstrous and deadening 
 discussion over the particular instrument or in- 
 stitution to which the truth was supposed to be 
 once and for all imparted as a sacred deposit. He 
 who is willing and strong to read those mighty 
 books may be fortified in his own soul by feeling
 
 HUXLEY 229 
 
 that the tremendous earnestness of this war over 
 authority must have impHed, beneath all the bat- 
 tle of words, an equal earnestness over the truth 
 for which the debated authority was supposed to 
 stand. But the actual result of that debate was 
 to weary and bewilder the mind of contemporary 
 men. Gradually the whole question of traditional 
 authority, and with it the higher intuition which 
 had been so obstinately identified with this au- 
 thority, begins to lose its hold, and in its place 
 comes the new reign of naturalism. ^ 
 
 Now naturalism is precisely the denial of any | 
 revealed authority or supernatural intuition 
 whatsoever. For the government of the fluctu- 
 ating element of nature it looks to reason alone, 
 which it recognizes as but another, if higher, as- 
 pect of the same nature. Hence the dominant 
 philosophy of the eighteenth century was a ra-^ 
 tionalism, which in religion denied, or at least 
 minimized, all that is mysterious and escapes the 
 net of logic, and in science regarded the world as 
 a vast machine which can be perfectly expressed 
 in a mathematical equation. Literature followed 
 the lead and became rational and pseudo-classic. 
 I would not exaggerate the regularity of this de- 
 velopment, for, after all, the human mind remains 
 always essentially the same and varies only as 
 one or another element comes uppermost. And 
 in particular any comment on the pseudo-classic 
 literature (which in itself has many comfortable
 
 230 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 excellences) should not fail to distinguish the 
 truly Augustan circle of Butler and Johnson and 
 Reynolds and Goldsmith and Burke, whose hu- 
 manism, like that of Horace, contained, not so 
 much explicitly as in solution, the higher insight 
 which the philosophy of their age was so busily 
 hiding away. They contained, that is to say, 
 some marks of true classicism as contrasted with 
 pseudo-classicism. Nevertheless the main cur- 
 rent of the times was evident enough, and on its 
 surface carried religion and science and litera- 
 ture in a compliant brotherhood. 
 
 Johnson and his school belonged essentially to 
 the main rationalistic stream of the age, though 
 in some respects they surpassed it. But by their 
 side there was springing up another school, 
 equally a child of naturalism, but hostile to what 
 may be called the official philosophy. Natural- 
 ism acknowledged both the reason and the in- 
 stincts or emotions as belonging to the nature of 
 man, and thus manifestly left the door open to 
 a revolt against the tyranny of one element of 
 nature over the other. Accordingly, al most with 
 the beginning of rationalism we see springing up, 
 timidly and uncertainly at first, various forms of 
 appeal to pure instinct and unrestrained emotion. 
 This voice of insubordination first became clear 
 and defiant and fully self-conscious in Blake; and 
 the message of Blake, repeated in a hundred vari- 
 ous notes, now tender and piercingly sweet, now
 
 HUXLEY 231 
 
 blurred by strange rumblings of thunderous 
 madness, is everywhere a summons to the per- 
 fect freedom of instinct and primitive emotion 
 and a denunciation of the control demanded by 
 reason or by authority of any sort : 
 
 Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak 
 enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason 
 usurps its place and governs the unwilHng. 
 
 The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. 
 
 He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. 
 
 These epigrams are from The Marriage of Heaven 
 and Hell, a book which Swinburne was to rank 
 "as about the greatest produced by the eight- 
 eenth century in the line of high poetry and 
 spiritual speculation,'" and which to Mr. Arthur 
 Symons was an anticipation of Nietzsche: "No 
 one can think and escape Nietzsche ; but Nietz- 
 sche has come after Blake, and will pass before 
 Blake passes." Now Swinburne and Mr. Sy- 
 mons were indubitably right in seeing in such 
 passages as these the very bible of romanticism, 
 and Blake's place as an expositor of that move- 
 ment, for England at least, is coming to be gen- 
 erally admitted. But in holding up Blake's re- 
 volt against reason as spiritual speculation they, 
 and others, have fallen into the error which, as it 
 seems to me, has made of romanticism the source 
 of endless illusions.
 
 232 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 In the field of the imagination the school of 
 Blake at the last carried victory with a high 
 hand over the pseudo-classic and humanistic 
 writers, and the nineteenth century opens upon 
 a world pretty well divided between the quarrel- 
 some twins of rational science and irrational 
 romanticism. In so far as the romantic imagina- 
 tion yields to the self-sufficiency of instinct and 
 gmotion it implies a real revolt from rationalism ; 
 i,t is in a way even more hostile to rationalism 
 than the classic use of the imagination, for class- 
 icism never involved a rejection of the reason, 
 though it differed from pseudo-classicism by 
 leaving the door open to an intuition above rea- 
 son. But the peculiar tone of romantic writing 
 comes not so much from the mere revolt against 
 pseudo-classicism as from ih£ illusion that this 
 revolt is a return to spiritual insight. Here I am 
 treading on sHppery ground, and it behooves me 
 to walk warily. That all the spiritual aspirations 
 of the nineteenth century were of a bastard birth, 
 only a very ignorant or wilful man would assert. 
 I Humanity is larger than any formula, and no age 
 can be limited by a label. In the romantic litera- 
 ture that unfolds from Blake there is much that is 
 simply true, much that is beautiful and magni- 
 ficent, and there are moments that express the 
 divine awe that belongs to the sudden inflooding 
 of the veritable other-world; but in the most 
 characteristic moods of that .literature, when it
 
 HUXLEY 233 
 
 expresses most perfectly the main current of the.., 
 age, there will be found, I believe, a deep confu- f 
 sion of ideas which results from assimilating the j 
 rebellion of the lower element of our nature with / 
 the control that comes from above nature. For 
 the infinite spirit which makes itself known as 
 a restraining check and a law of concentration 
 within the flux of nature, this new aspiration of 
 liberty would substitute the mere endless expan- 
 sion which ensues upon the denial of any restraint 
 whatsoever; in place of the higher intuition which 
 is above reason it would commit mankind to the 
 lower intuition which is beneath reason. This 
 illusion of the senses has dazzled the human mind 
 in other ages as well as in the present. It show^ 
 itself here and there in the classics of antiquity. 
 It developed a special form in the Alexandrian 
 union of Oriental religion and Occidental philo- 
 sophy, and was thus passed on to the Middle Ages. 
 It can be found in the seventeenth century beside 
 the true insight. It assumes many disguises and is 
 often extremely difficult to distinguish from the 
 supreme disillusion. The very fact that the same 
 word, romantic, is used to designate the wonder 
 of the infinite and the wonder of the limitless 
 shows how easily we merge together these extreme 
 opposites. But the historic romanticism of the 
 nineteenth century, when it strikes its central 
 jiote, whether it be the morbid egotism of a Beck- 
 ford, or the religious defalcation of a Newman,
 
 / 
 
 234 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM " 
 
 or the sestheticism of a Pater, or the dregs of 
 naturalistic pantheism seen in a Fiona Macleod, 
 or the impotent revolt from humanitarian sym- 
 pathy of a Nietzsche — this romanticism is in its 
 essence a denial of classical dualism and an illus- 
 ory substitution of the mere limitless expansion 
 of our impulsive nature for that true infinite 
 within the heart of man, which is not of nature 
 and whose voice is heard as the inner check, re- 
 straining, centralizing, and forming. 
 
 If romanticism is thus rightly defined, its point 
 of contact with science is easily marked. Those 
 limitless forces which were raised into the scien- 
 tific hypothesis of a self-evolving, or rather self- 
 creating, universe are the exact counterpart in 
 outer nature of those limitless desires or impulses 
 in the heart which are the substance of the ro- 
 mantic illusion. They find their union in that very 
 modern philosophy of life which may be called 
 indifferently scientific or romantic. As it is con- 
 cerned with conduct and the inner life rather than 
 with material phenomena, it may be regarded as 
 the offspring of romanticism ; as it enjoys its great 
 authority from a supposed connection with the 
 actual discoveries of physical law, and has ob- 
 tained its precise character from the evolutionary 
 hypothesis, it may with equal propriety be re- 
 garded as the bastard offspring of science — as, 
 in a word, the latest form of philosophical sci- 
 ence. The keynote of this new philosophy,
 
 HUXLEY 235 
 
 whether it take one of the many forms of Prag- 
 matism or express itself in the evolutionary lan- 
 guage of M. Bergson or conceal itself in the sar- 
 donic indifference of the man in the street, is a 
 kind of laisser-faire, a belief that, as the physical 
 world has unrolled itself by its own expansive 
 forces, so human society progresses by some uni- 
 versal instinct, needing no rational and selective 
 guidance, no imposition of moral restraint, no 
 conscious insight. 
 
 And mark well, we are here concerned not with 
 an idle question of the schools, but with a very 
 real outcome in conduct. You will find the trace 
 of this philosophy in every department of life. It 
 has remoulded our whole practice of education; 
 and this perhaps is the point where its influence is 
 clearest and where attack may be most success- 
 fully directed. Perhaps we do not often stop to 
 consider the relation between the usurpation of 
 purely scientific studies in our college curriculum 
 with the Rousselian notion that education must 
 place no restraint upon the child, but must 
 merely help him to expand in the direction of his 
 emotional instincts ; yet in reality that relation is 
 to-day the main factor in shaping our pedagogical 
 theories. Positive science is a noble vocation, but 
 just so sure as it is made in considerable part the 
 basis of education, instead of being treated as 
 a profession, like law or medicine, to be taken 
 up after a general education, just so surely the
 
 236 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 confusions of philosophical science will follow and 
 claim authority in our schools. The unhampered 
 elective system, which is merely the pedagogical 
 form of the new philosophy of laisser-faire, is in a 
 way anything and everything; but one character- 
 istic and one result of it are omnipresent. It is 
 characterized by a revolt from Greek and Latin, 
 due in part no doubt to such subsidiary causes as 
 the pedantry which laid its paralyzing hand on 
 classical instruction, but due more essentially to 
 the hostility between the classical way of viewing 
 life and the new juncture of romantic and scien- 
 tific philosophy. The result of the modern sys- 
 tem is a laxity of mind in those who have drifted 
 through our institutions from kindergarten to 
 university, a repugnance for good reading, in a 
 word, that lack of real education which is more 
 and more deplored by instructors in school and 
 college. 
 
 In politics the spirit of laisser-faire shows it- 
 self in the feeling that to be right we need only 
 follow unhesitatingly the clamour of the day; 
 whereas any suppression of a self-assertive move- 
 ment in favour of a saner ideal already established 
 is denounced as reaction and death. Take, for 
 instance, our attitude towards socialism. Per- 
 haps no comment is more frequently on the lips 
 of the man in the street — that mysterious arbiter 
 of civilization — than the words: It is bound to 
 come, why strive against it ? As a matter of fact
 
 .f-^ 
 
 HUXLEY / 237 
 
 socialism, in some very imperfect form, may in- (jC ^ 
 deed come, but is by no means bound to come.^J^ c 
 To say that the whole teaching of history proves '' ^ 
 its necessity is to forget most of the chapters of Jy'^ , 
 that book, and is to fall into the common error (y^ ^^ 
 of the half-educated who extend their knowledge pf^ 
 of one age over all ages. I cannot see much differ- 
 ence between those who accept some form of 
 socialism because by the very definition of Karl 
 Marx it is a "fatal necessity," and those who 
 accepted the old scholastic notion of God, with 
 all its consequences, because by their own defini- 
 tion of God he must exist. The question here, 
 however, is not the goodness or evil of socialism 
 in itself, but the perilous state of any society 
 which for some blind law of evolution surrenders 
 its right to criticize and to determine its own 
 course rationally. "Man," says M. Georges 
 Sorel, the philosopher and for a time one of the 
 leaders of the "syndicalist" branch of socialism 
 in France — "man has genius only in the measure 
 that he does not reflect." And when asked what 
 new form of government should be erected on the 
 ruins of society brought about by the general 
 strike, M. Sorel replied that with such construct- 
 ive thought for the future we had nothing to do; 
 we had learned from Bergson to trust ourselves 
 implicitly to the blind instinctive forces of nature. 
 In like manner in regard to female suffrage : we 
 deceive ourselves if we suppose that its admission
 
 238 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 or rejection will be the result of argument and 
 rational conviction. The power that is bringing 
 it into practical life is the sentiment heard from 
 the mouth of every other man you meet: If the 
 women want it, why, let them have it. And this 
 sentiment finds support in the weary fatalism of 
 the day: It is bound to come whether you like it or 
 not; why resist the irresistible? Again, the ques- 
 tion is not whether female suffrage is a good or an 
 evil thing in itself, but the ignoble abdication of 
 judgement in accepting any present tendency 
 as a fatal force which it is useless, if not wrong, to 
 curb. 
 
 And so, to pass to quite another field, the lais- 
 ser-faire of philosophical science is beginning to" 
 modify our whole treatment of crime. We no 
 longer punish the criminal as a being responsible 
 for his acts, under the belief that there is in man a 
 voluntary power to shape his own character, but 
 when we punish him at all, we do so apologet- 
 ically, as if society and not he were the guilty 
 party, and as if his crime were merely one of the 
 products of evolution, like any disease to be cured 
 by fresh air and flattery. I have no desire to 
 enter into the intricacies of the new penology. 
 But I have been impressed by two opinions from 
 very diverse sources. I recall reading in one of 
 the books of that connoisseur of the underworld, 
 the late Josiah Flynt, the remark of a professional 
 burglar to the effect that the only prevention
 
 HUXLEY 239 
 
 against crime was sure and sharp punishment. 
 And I connect with this observation the recent 
 statement of the PoHce Commissioner of New 
 York, to the effect that the excess of violence and 
 lawlessness in this city is due to the number of sus- 
 pended sentences and the general feeling among 
 those criminally disposed that the courts will not 
 convict. Mr. Waldo may have had various rea- 
 sons for offering such an apology for his depart- 
 ment, but it is significant to compare certain 
 statistics of New York with those of London 
 where the older habits of swift and relentless 
 judgement still prevail. In our American city the 
 average annual number of murders for the years 
 1908-10 was one hundred and seventeen, while 
 the average number of convictions was only 
 twenty-five. In London, with its population of 
 seven million, the average for those years was 
 twenty murders, for which fifteen persons either 
 committed suicide before police action or were 
 convicted.^ Among the causes for this alarming 
 
 * The following statistics from a leading article in the London Nation 
 of March 30, 1912, entitled The Breakdown of American Justice, give a 
 wider range to the question: " Since 1885 there have been some 177,000 
 murders and homicides in the United States, but under 3000 executions. 
 In 1885 the number of murders was 1808; in 1895 it had risen to 10,500; 
 in 1910 it stood at 8975. In 1885 the number of executions was 108; in 
 1895 it was 132; in 1910 it was 104. Roughly speaking, Americans are 
 now killing one another at the rate of over 9000 a year. Looking over 
 the statistics of the past seven-and-twenty years, one finds that, while 
 executions have remained virtually stationary, murders and homicides 
 have multiplied five-fold. In 1885 for every murderer executed seven- 
 teen murders were committed; in 1895 the proportion was one to seventy- 
 nine; in 1910 it was one to eighty-six. There are, indeed, few crimes of 
 which an American can more safely be guilty. If he commits a murder
 
 240 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 disproportion our evolutionary attitude towards 
 crime is certainly not the least effective. In the 
 end this whole philosophy of naturalism, which 
 bids us follow the lead of some blind self-develop- 
 ing instinct, is subject to the rebuke uttered by 
 Bishop Butler long ago: "A late author [Wollas- 
 ton] of great and deserved reputation says, that to 
 place virtue in following nature, is at best a loose 
 way of talk. And he has reason to say this, if 
 what I think he intends to express, though with 
 great decency, be true, that scarce any other sense 
 can be put upon those words, but acting as any of 
 the several parts, without distinction, of a man's 
 nature happened most to incline him." 
 
 In these practical and, perhaps, debatable ap- 
 plications we may seem to have got far away 
 from the man whom I upheld as the typical 
 spokesman of philosophical science. In fact the 
 rational hypothesis of evolution as proclaimed by 
 Huxley was, superficially considered, the very 
 opposite of the confessedly anti-rational hypo- 
 thesis that lends authority to the doctrine of moral 
 
 the odds are more than three to one against his ever being brought to 
 trial; they are more than ten to one against his being sentenced to im- 
 prisonment; and, as has been said, they are more than eighty to one 
 against his suffering the extreme penalty of the law. Those are the 
 chances officially ascertained from official statistics, and they apply to 
 the country as a whole and to all its people. But it need hardly be said 
 that if the murderer is a white man the odds in his favour are very much 
 above the statistical average, and very much below them if he is a negro. 
 Only one country in the world, Mexico, exceeds the American record of 
 murders, a record that is proportionally five times as great in the United 
 States as in Australia, more than fourteen times as great as in England 
 and Wales, eight times as great as in Japan, ten times as great as in 
 Canada, and about twenty-five times as great as in Germany.".
 
 HUXLEY 241 
 
 laisser-faire. Nevertheless their parentage is cer- 
 tain, and even in Huxley hints of the derived 
 philosophy are not infrequent. 
 
 In education, though Huxley's interests were 
 too broad and in some respects too literary to per- 
 mit a harsh condemnation of the humanities, yet 
 all his energy was devoted to introducing science 
 into the curriculum of the universities and 
 schools. No doubt his action was justifiable to a 
 certain extent and redounded to the genuine pro- 
 fit of pure science ; but it had also the negative re- 
 sult at least of starting that transformation which 
 has made of our classrooms a nursery for the 
 sophisms of philosophical science. He was con- 
 vinced that the sciences in themselves are suf- 
 ficient for a liberal education, and on occasion he 
 was ready to commend a foundation which made 
 "no provision for 'mere literary instruction and 
 education,'" meaning by this "the ordinary 
 classical course of our schools and universities." 
 Biology, he thought, included really the whole 
 philosophy of life; and education he limited to 
 "instruction of the intellect in the laws of nature." 
 If there was apparent liberality in his extension 
 of these laws of nature to include "not merely 
 things and their forces, but men and their ways," 
 there was also in it the germ of a mischievous 
 ambiguity. 
 
 In matters political Huxley's practical sense 
 of affairs kept his judgement clearer, and I do
 
 242 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 not know that there is anything in his writings 
 which contradicts his expressed fear and dishke 
 of ^^regimentation and individualism — enforced 
 SociaHsm and Anarchy." He has ringing words 
 of rebuke for the whole poHcy of drifting (see, 
 for instance, his letter of March 21, 1886, to a 
 Member of Parliament). Yet the real tendency 
 of his ideas comes out plainly enough in his at- 
 titude towards female suffrage. He was himself 
 strongly opposed to the admission of women into 
 politics, holding for biological reasons a sharp 
 distinction between the spheres of the two sexes. 
 Nevertheless, when he came to deal directly with 
 the emancipation of women his method was that 
 of the man in the street. "Let them have a fair 
 field," he said, "but let them understand, as the 
 necessary correlative, that they are to have no 
 favour. Let nature alone sit high above the lists, 
 'rain influence and judge the prize.'" 
 •7%.- -i The new romantic philosophy of evolution as 
 a continuous process of self-creation had scarcely 
 arisen to perturb the rationalism of Huxley, and 
 he was too stalwartly intellectual to have suc- 
 cumbed to it even if it had been in the air; yet the 
 outcome of his teaching was. that .exaltation of 
 .science which laid the minds of the next genera- 
 tion open to its alluring seduction. The final in- 
 fluence of his words, if not always his avowed in- 
 tention, was to establish the new law of progress: 
 Let nature sit high above the lists; which may be
 
 HUXLEY 243 
 
 interpreted by his own remark on another occa- - 
 sion : ' ' The best way of getting disorder into order v 
 [is] to let it alone." Not many lives in the Vic- 
 torian era were more unselfish than his, not many 
 men pursued truth with a nobler devotion, not 
 many had broader and finer interests; neverthe- 
 less, in the end it must be said, sadly and rever- / 
 ently, that his legacy to mankind was confusion 
 of ideas and relaxation of judgement. 
 
 We have seen the triumphs of Huxley at Ox- 
 ford, the seat of his enemies. Let us take leave 
 of this somewhat ungrateful theme by calling up 
 another scene at the same university. In 1864, 
 there was a Diocesan Conference at Oxford. 
 There chanced at this time to be in the neigh- 
 bourhood a man who was neither priest nor 
 scientist, a man given to absurd freaks of intel- 
 lectual charlatanry, yet showing at times also 
 such marvellous and sudden penetration into the 
 heart of things as comes only to genius. It was 
 Disraeli. "He lounged into the assembly," so the 
 scene is described by Froude, "in a black velvet 
 shooting-coat and a wide-awake hat, as if he had 
 been accidentally passing through the town. . . . 
 He began in his usual affected manner, slowly 
 and rather pompously, as if he had nothing to 
 say beyond perfunctory platitudes." And then, 
 turning to the presiding officer, the same Bishop 
 Wilberforce whom four years earlier Huxley 
 had so crushingly rebuked, he uttered one of his
 
 244 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 enigmatic and unforgettable epigrams: "What is 
 the question now placed before society with a glib- 
 ness the most astounding? The question is this: 
 Is man an ape or an angel? I, my lord, am on the 
 side of the angels," The audience, not kindly 
 disposed to the speaker, applauded the words as 
 a jest; they were carried the next day over the 
 whole land by the newspapers ; they have often 
 been repeated as an example of Disraeli's brilliant 
 but empty wit. I suspect that beneath their sur- 
 face glitter, and hidden within their metaphor 
 pointed to suit an Oriental taste, these words 
 contain a truth that shall some day break to 
 pieces the new philosophy which Huxley spent 
 his life so devotedly to establish.
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 
 
 The life of man consists of impulses which 
 spring from the coming together of inner desires 
 and outer impressions. By the word desires is 
 here not meant the intelligent want of a definite 
 object, but the mere outreaching of vital energy^ 
 Desires and impressions, so far as our knowledge 
 attains, cannot exist independently, that is to 
 say, there can be no living organism without the 
 constant interaction of an inner vital energy and 
 an enveloping world. Impulses tend to pass into 
 mental and physical activities, of the latter of 
 which many belong to our animal functions and 
 scarcely reach to the senses. Mental activities 
 react in the form of new desires, physical activ- 
 ities in the form of new impressions. Certain ac- 
 tivities are beneficial to our organization, others 
 are detrimental. The sum of desires and impres- 
 sions we call the great self-moving, incessant flux. 
 
 II 
 
 Beside the flux of life there is also that within 
 man which displays itself intermittently as an 
 inhibition upon this or that impulse, preventing 
 its prolongation in activity, and making a pause
 
 248 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 or eddy, so to speak, in the stream. This nega- 
 tion of the flux we call the inner check. It is not 
 the mere blocking of one impulse by another, 
 which is a quality of the confusion of the flux 
 itself, but a restraint upon the flux exercised by 
 a force contrary to it. 
 
 Ill 
 
 In the repeated exercise of the inner check we 
 are conscious of two elements of our being — the 
 inner check itself and the stream of impulses — 
 as coexistent and cooperative, yet essentially 
 irreconcilable, forces. What, if anything, lies 
 behind the inner check, what it is, why and how 
 it acts or neglects to act, we cannot express in 
 rational terms. Of the ultimate source of desires 
 and impressions, and of the relation of the result- 
 ing flux of impulses to the inner check in that 
 union which we call ourselves, we are darkly 
 ignorant. These are the final elements of self- 
 knowledge — on the one hand multiplicity of 
 impulses, on the other hand unity and cupidita- 
 tum oblivio, alta rerum quies. Consciousness, the 
 more deeply we look into ourselves, tells us that 
 we are ceaselessly changing, yet tells us also 
 that we are ever the same. This dualism of con- 
 sciousness, it seems, is the last irrational fact, the 
 report behind which we cannot go, the decision 
 against which there is no appeal, the reality 
 which only stands out the more clearly the more
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 249 
 
 it is questioned. If a man denies this dualism of 
 consciousness there is no argument with him, but 
 a fundamental difference of intuition which will 
 follow into every view of philosophy and crit- 
 icism. 
 
 IV 
 
 The attempt to resolve the irrational paradox 
 by asserting that there is an absolute conscious- 
 ness which embraces the two elements of a lower 
 consciousness can only fall into endless regres- 
 sion. Thus, let A and B represent the two ele- 
 ments of consciousness. If a man asserts that 
 there is a third element, C, which is conscious of 
 A and B as mere aspects of one and the same 
 mental activity, then for the original dualism he 
 establishes a new dualism in which C is one ele- 
 ment while A and B together form the other 
 element. And so on without end. The diffi- 
 culty arises here from attempting to treat the 
 so-called self-knowledge of consciousness as if it 
 were the same intellectual process as knowledge 
 which requires a subject and an object, a knower 
 and a thing known, or, in our mental life, a pre- 
 sent and a past. We do not know the flux by the 
 inner check, or the inner check by the flux, or 
 either of these by some other element of our 
 being, but we are immediately and inexplicably 
 conscious of both at once — we are both at 
 once.
 
 250 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 V 
 
 Reason, which is our instrument of analysis 
 and definition, is itself an organ of the flux. In 
 endeavouring, therefore, to define the element 
 of our being contrary to its sphere, it can only 
 employ terms which express difference from the 
 qualities of the flux and which must end in pure 
 negation. Thus, in the language of philosophy, 
 absolute unity, or sameness, is merely the com- 
 plete negation of variety, and conveys no positive 
 meaning; immutability, the negation of change; 
 rest, the negation of motion; eternity, the nega- 
 tion of time; infinity, the negation of all our ex- 
 perience. The error of the reason is to deny the 
 existence of this absolute element because it must 
 be defined in terms of negation. By the use of the 
 term inner check, we accept the inability of the 
 reason to define positively this element of our 
 being, but imply also that it may be the cause 
 of quite positive and definable effects within the 
 flux. 
 
 VI 
 
 As one impulse is checked, some other impulse 
 may come to the surface and may be permitted 
 to pass into activity. The inner check has thus 
 the semblance of an act of attention or choice. 
 Attention, nevertheless, must not be confused 
 with the inner check, which is essentially, in so
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 251 
 
 far as it can be expressed in rational terms, a pure 
 inhibition, having the absence of variety and 
 change which belongs only to absolute negation. 
 Attention is the name of the immediate effect of 
 the inner check in the positive sphere of activi- 
 ties, the last point to which rational analysis and 
 emotional appeal can apply. There is thus in the 
 admonition to attend, that is, deliberately to 
 stay, the flux of impulses and exercise an act of 
 choice in activity, an irreducible paradox, similar 
 to the mystery in religion which calls a man to 
 repent yet teaches that repentance is the work of 
 divine grace. 
 
 VII 
 
 Feeling is the consciousness of an Increase or 
 decrease in the free play of the desires. 
 
 VIII 
 
 In pleasure we feel an enlargement of life. 
 Pleasure has two moments : — the coming together 
 of accordant impressions and desires, and, fur- 
 ther, the unobstructed passage of the resulting .a-' 
 impulse into activity. In pain, using the word 
 ^oadly as the contrary of pleasure, we feel a 
 diminution of life. Pain also has two moments : — 
 the coming together of discordant impressions 
 and desires, or the obstruction of any impulse 
 from passing into activity. A detrimental activ- 
 ity may be immediately pleasurable, yet will re-
 
 252 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 suit in pain, since its effect at the last is to react 
 in impressions that are in disaccord with our 
 desires. 
 
 IX 
 
 Happiness is the feeling that accompanies the 
 governing of our impulses by the inner check. 
 Repentance and remorse are the feelings that 
 accompany the insufficient exercise of the inner 
 check. Happiness, when it means obstruction to 
 a detrimental impulse, may be associated with, 
 or preceded by, some degree of pain ; it is asso- 
 ciated with pleasure when free course is per- 
 mitted to a beneficial impulse. In the end happi- 
 ness and pleasure tend to concur. Repentance 
 and remorse are transitional feelings, the one 
 tending to pass into happiness, the other into the 
 settled gloom of misery. 
 
 X 
 
 Pleasure and pain, which belong entirely to 
 the flux, remorse and misery, which belong pre- 
 dominantly to the flux, bring with them a sense 
 of our life as diverse from other lives; these are 
 the personal feelings, and the sum, or resultant, 
 of them is personality. Happiness and repent- 
 ance, on the contrary, tend to a sense of our life as 
 free from such isolating qualities; these are the 
 impersonal feelings, and the sum, or resultant, of 
 them is the image in the flux, as it were, of the
 
 < 
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 253 
 
 spirit, or so-called higher Self. It is the part of 
 wisdom to distinguish between what is personal 
 and what is impersonal. 
 
 XI 
 
 The emotions are the feelings of pleasure and 
 pain modified by the complex activities of the 
 mind. They are accompanied by instinctive phy- 
 sical motions and perturbations, and on examina- 
 tion seem to be more or less clearly localized in 
 the body. The cardinal emotions may be arranged 
 thus in the scale of personality: — joy and grief, 
 hope and fear, complacence and anger, love and 
 hatred, vanity and shame, pride and debasement. 
 J[oy_is the emotion that attends the reflexion on 
 the possession of a particular pleasure or on the 
 cessation of a particular pain, grief the contrary; 
 Jhope is the expectation of joy, fear the contrary; 
 complacence is the sense that another person is 
 the cause of joy, anger the contrary; love (in a 
 restricted definition) is the sense that another 
 person is the cause of hope, hatred the contrary; 
 vanity is the sense that another person feels our 
 superiority in the particular emotions, shame the 
 sense that another person feels our inferiority in 
 the particular emotions; pride is the independent 
 sense of our superiority, debasement the inde- 
 pendent sense of our inferiority. Vanity and 
 pride, sh^me and debasement, are thus con- 
 nected with our personal feelings as a whole, and
 
 254 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 are the main factors of personality. It needs often 
 the most dehcate judgement to discriminate 
 between these personal emotions and their im- 
 personal counterparts, to distinguish vanity and 
 pride from the self-approval of happiness, shame 
 and debasement from the humility of repentance. 
 In common usage the distinction between these 
 words is often ignored. 
 
 XII 
 
 The various aspects of mental activity we may, 
 without implication of the meaning conveyed 
 in the so-called facultative psychology, designate 
 the faculties of memory, reason, and imagination. 
 These faculties we can in a way define and dis- 
 tinguish, but their essential nature and their re- 
 lation to one another are probably as impenetra- 
 ble as self-knowledge itself. Every process of 
 mental activity appears to implicate all the facul- 
 ties together, but with varying degrees of em- 
 phasis. It may be surmised, but only surmised, 
 that in some way the faculties themselves have 
 been created by the action of a force within the 
 flux obedient to the inner check, and that the 
 regularity of their function depends on the ful- 
 ! ness of the control of this check. 
 
 
 XIII 
 
 Memory is the faculty by which we retain the 
 effects of activities as the potential source of
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 255 
 
 other activities. The sum of these dormant activ- 
 ities constitutes experience, or the data of Hfe. 
 
 XIV 
 
 The inner check allows to memory the oppor- 
 tunity to balance a present impulse with the im- 
 pulses of experience. Thus a man has a certain 
 impulse which results in activity. The detri- 
 mental or beneficial effect of this activity remains 
 dormant in experience. If, when a similar impulse 
 arises within him, he attends and opposes a mo- 
 mentary check to the passing of this impulse into 
 activity, the memory of the former effect may 
 produce a confirming or a contradictory impulse. 
 In this way beneficial impulses are strengthened, 
 detrimental impulses are weakened. It is prob- 
 able that the whole of life is in some manner 
 retained passively in the memory of every man. 
 But the readiness of memory in choosing and 
 awakening impulses from its supply varies with 
 individual men. Not the scope only, but the se- 
 lective activity of memory in response to the op- ( 
 portunities afforded by the inner check, measures | 
 the fulness and richness of life. >■ 
 
 XV 
 
 Tra diti on is th e experience of society. It is 
 stored up for use by what may be called the ob- 
 jective memory. The chief function of education
 
 256 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 is to transfer the wealth of a selective tradition 
 from society to the individual. 
 
 XVI 
 
 By memory the diversity of the flux becomes 
 to us succession in time. The concrete emotion of 
 passing time seems to spring from a divergence 
 between the inner and the outer flux; and there is 
 a regular association of this emotion with person- 
 ality. In pain, when the impressions intrude 
 harshly upon us, we feel strongly both our person- 
 ality and the lapse of time. In pleasure, when our 
 portion of the flux is dominant, personality is 
 strong, but we are scarcely aware of time except 
 as pleasure is interrupted by fear for its continu- 
 ance. In happiness, as personality tends to be 
 absorbed in the consciousness of the higher Self, 
 so the sense of time is lost in a consciousness of 
 duration without succession which is akin at once 
 Jto time and timelessness. The abstract activity 
 of the faculty of memory gives us the conception 
 of pure time. 
 
 XVII 
 
 Reason is the faculty of discretion by which we 
 perceive sameness and difference. Its effect is to 
 break up the flowing datum of experience into 
 units. By the perception of sameness it combines 
 these units in larger and more comprehensive 
 conceptions; by the perception of difference in
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 257 
 
 smaller and less comprehensive conceptions. Its 
 law is the exclusion of contradictories; that is to 
 say, it holds that if two things are totally differ- 
 ent they can have no bond of sameness. It may 
 be designated in accordance with the material in 
 which it works as objective or subjective. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 Imagination is the faculty which sensualizes -^ 
 the data of experience apart from ourselves as « 
 separate existences. It runs parallel with the 
 reason, and like the reason may be designated in 
 accordance with the material in which it works as 
 objective or subjective. 
 
 XIX 
 
 The objective reason deals, not with the whole 
 field of experience, but with the impulses that 
 arise under the immediate impact of impressions 
 from the outer world, by its perception of same- 
 ness and difference conceiving this material as 
 more or less comprehensive units. The objective 
 imagination projects this material into the void 
 as discrete phenomena. These phenomena are 
 seemingly, but not really, made up of the pure 
 matter of impressions, unconnected with our de- 
 sires; of the actual outer world from which our 
 impressions flow we can have no unmixed know- 
 ledge.
 
 258 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 XX 
 
 By the abstract activity of the objective reason 
 we get the conception of number. By the object- 
 ive imagination we get the conception of pure 
 space. The simultaneous activity of reason and 
 imagination gives us the conception of specific 
 extension. Time and extension together give us 
 the conception of pure motion. The formulation 
 of these abstract conceptions is pure mathemat- 
 ics. 
 
 XXI 
 
 The sum of phenomena is nature. As the ma- 
 terial out of which phenomena are formed reaches 
 the faculties through the various senses, or 
 organs of perception, our knowledge of nature 
 is conditioned by the activity of these bodily 
 organs and is subject to distortion by their irreg- 
 ular activity. Knowledge of a particular phe- 
 nomenon is reckoned accurate in so far as it fits in 
 with our knowledge of other phenomena, and 
 in so far as this general knowledge fits in with 
 the knowledge reported by other persons. 
 
 XXII 
 
 Science, primarily, is the systematic accumu- 
 lation of accurate knowledge. Secondarily, it is 
 the endeavour to express the conditioned know- 
 ledge of the senses in the abstract conceptions of
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 259 
 
 the faculties. There is a regular gradation of the 
 sciences as they deal with the more complicated 
 aspects of experience, and the margin of facts 
 unamenable to abstract law increases with the 
 complexity of the material. Each science, there- 
 fore, attempts to find the expression of its law 
 in terms of the simpler science below it. Thus, 
 by a series of approximations, history as a science 
 tries to find its law in sociology, sociology in psy- 
 chology, psychology in biology, biology in chem- 
 istry, chemistry in physics. Physics reduces phe- 
 nomena to the simplest and most constant form 
 of perception, considering them as concrete ex- 
 tension (mass) and concrete motion (motion, as 
 change of mass in position). In attempting to 
 express these physical perceptions in the abstract 
 formulae of mathematics there may be conven- 
 ience, but there is no real addition to scientific 
 knowledge. Between mathematics and physics 
 stands the concrete reality of energy or the im- 
 pact of the impressions as received through the 
 senses. We have then this baffling paradox: \ 
 there is no pure science but mathematics, and 
 mathematics is not a science since it has no 
 content of knowledge. 
 
 XXIII 
 
 Whatever is recognized as remaining in the self 
 after the separation of the phenomena of nature 
 is called the soul. The body belongs to nature,
 
 26o THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 but it is distinguished by its special association 
 with an individual soul. The relation of cor- 
 poreal to mental activity as cause, consequence, 
 or parallel existence is profoundly obscure. The 
 soul and the body form together what we call our 
 organization. Perception of this external dual- 
 ism of soul and body often tends to supplant that 
 of the true inner dualism of consciousness. It 
 may have value as a symbolic expression of the 
 inner dualism, in so far as the body by means of 
 the organs of perception is the instrument by 
 which the inner flux and the outer flux are united 
 to form our impulsive life, and is thus set apart 
 from the inner check. The word nature may be 
 applied specifically to the sum of phenomena 
 exclusive of the living body of the man himself. 
 
 XXIV 
 
 The subjective reason deals with the whole ma- 
 terial of experience, including both the immediate 
 impulses and their train of reactions in our men- 
 tal life. Its material is thus dominated not by 
 outer impressions, as is the material out of which 
 natural phenomena are formed, but by inner 
 desires. By its means we conceive our mental 
 activities as discrete quantities and the mind 
 itself as a discrete unit. The abstract activity 
 of the subjective reason gives us the principles of 
 logic. The subjective imagination is the use 
 of the faculty by which we.^ro]ect our complex
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 261 
 
 inner experience into nature as existences apart 
 from the soul. The abstract activity of the sub- 
 jective imagination gives us_the idea_of creation. 
 
 XXV 
 
 When by the objective imagination nature has 
 been set apart from ourselves, the subjective im- 
 agination may intervene and endow these phe- 
 nomena with the activities of our inner life. This 
 is the pathetic fallacy, which makes nature to cor- 
 respond to our personal emotions. It may take 
 the form of an apparent absorption of the soul in 
 nature or of an apparent absorption of nature 
 in the soul. Then nature seems to smile or weep 
 with us, or by a reversal of feeling to show a con- 
 trary face. 
 
 XXVI 
 
 When the phenomena of nature appear to be 
 under the control of a force corresponding to the 
 inner check, they are said, in a general way, to be 
 beautiful. More specifically beauty is this par- 
 ticular sense of unity in diversity as manifested 
 by design, form, harmony, clear and regular tran- 
 sition, relation of parts. It is commonly mingled 
 with other perceptions of the one in the many — 
 such as sublimity, grandeur, charm, grace — more 
 or less closely related or subordinate to it. Thus 
 the very stability of the mountains upreared 
 amidst the shifting panorama of the atmo- 
 sphere, the endurance of great waters in their
 
 262 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 everlasting fluctuations, suggest the indwelling 
 of some eternal word of command. The quiet 
 gleam of light, the purity of colours, the melody 
 of sound, hint at some deep-hidden principle of 
 joy. The brave persistence of growing things, the 
 stealthy instincts of wild life, proclaim the im- 
 manence of some master virtue. This formative 
 power within phenomena we often think of as 
 Nature personified. 
 
 XXVII 
 
 The consolation of nature is an impersonal emo- 
 tion arising from the confirmation of our inner 
 \ consciousness of dualism ; for beauty is, as it were, 
 j a visible image of the possible happiness of the 
 I soul. This consolation is peculiarly liable to suf- 
 fer perversion from the pathetic fallacy and from 
 the usurpations of reason. It is after all but an 
 illusion that trembles at the touch of analysis. 
 Hence the sense of uneasiness that often accom- 
 panies the perception of beauty, and the diffi- 
 culty of reconciling ethics and aesthetics. 
 
 O nimium caelo et pelago confise sereno! 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 In the end, when the great griefs of life attack 
 us, there has always been, and is, one only con- 
 solation unmixed with shame and debasement. 
 Time may deaden and mechanical immersion in 
 the flux may conceal the cause of grief, but the
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 263 
 
 true liberation comes only with the knowledge of 
 the universality of evil and pain in human des- 
 tiny, and with the consciousness that something 
 within us stands apart from the everlasting flux 
 ^and from our passions which also belong to the 
 flux. 
 
 a^ 
 
 XXIX 
 
 ^rt is the attempt, by means of the subjective 
 imagination, to establish the experience of the 
 individual in tradition. Serious art is thus al- 
 most necessarily concerned with the past and 
 with ambitions of the future. In„so far as it deals 
 with beauty, it is an attempt to adapt the beauty 
 of nature as seen through the objective imagina- 
 tion to the demands of the subjective imagination. 
 It differs from the pathetic fallacy by implying a 
 distinct and more or less revocable addition to 
 nature rather than a fusion of nature and the 
 soul. 
 
 XXX 
 
 The various arts are limited to specific fields of 
 experience in accordance with the medium in 
 which they work, and they rise in dignity as the 
 sense to which they are directed has less of the 
 flux and more of mental stability in its activity. 
 Thus, they may be arranged in a scale of honour 
 as they act through the medium of taste and 
 odour, sound, colour and line, form. For the
 
 264 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 same reason their emotional appeal is more per- 
 sonal as they descend in this scale, more im- 
 personal as they ascend. The so-called confusion 
 of the genres, by obscuring distinctions, intro- 
 duces an additional and unnecessary element of 
 instability in the medium employed. Its effect, 
 therefore, is to enhance the merely personal ap- 
 peal of an art and to lower its dignity and imper- 
 sonal appeal. 
 
 XXXI 
 
 Language is the medium by which we under- 
 take to convey experience completely and directly 
 rather than as divided and refracted by a particu- 
 lar organ of perception ; it may be less intense and 
 precise than the various senses in their proper 
 fields, but is deeper and broader than any one of 
 them. The creative use of language, or literature, 
 is thus of the arts, but separated from them by its 
 scope, seeming by its universality to be more 
 essentially a function of life. Rhythm lends to 
 language something of the sense quality of music, 
 and relates poetry more closely to the specific arts 
 while not depriving it entirely of the free range of 
 literature. 
 
 XXXII 
 
 Works of art are varied in so far as they are 
 created by the imagination out of the material of 
 the flux, and substantially they depend on the 
 richness of the artist's experience. Formally they
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 265 
 
 rise to a common standard of excellence in so far 
 as the imagination of the artist is subject to the 
 control of the unvaried inner check. So, too, 
 taste, or the appreciation of art, passes from the 
 impressionistic whim of the individual and from 
 the larger convention of an age or a people to a 
 universal canon just to the degree that it is regu- 
 lated by the inner check. Criticism is thus not 
 left to waver without a fixed criterion ; and in the 
 understanding of dualism it possesses further a 
 key to the main divergences of thought and ac- 
 tion, and a constant norm of classification. 
 
 XXXIII 
 
 Talent is measured by a man's ability to give 
 expression to the material of experience. Genius, 
 or inspiration, is measured by the degree to 
 which the immediate consciousness of dualism 
 enters into expression. Talent and genius in their 
 highest stages will coincide, but in their lower 
 stages they may exist together in varying pro- 
 portions. 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 Hallucination comes when we seem to perceive 
 the images of the subjective imagination as inde- 
 pendent entities endowed with powers which are 
 not subject to our control and which may work 
 upon the soul. Hallucination is to the subjective 
 imagination that which the pathetic fallacy is to 
 theobjective imagination.
 
 266 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 XXXV 
 
 Reason may be mistaken in its distinctions and 
 the imagination may wander into fallacy and 
 hallucination, but the sure penalties of practice 
 prevent them from going far astray in the normal 
 man. And, though they do not, even if rightly 
 exercised, tell us the essential reality of the outer 
 world and of the soul, yet when they deal with the 
 actual material of experience they make the real- 
 ness of our own life. There is, however, another 
 so-called metaphysical activity of these faculties, 
 by which, transcending their proper function, 
 they lead to absolute error and deception. When, 
 on the one hand, they usurp the function of the 
 organs of perception and jiindertake to give per- 
 ceptive realness to abstract conceptions of time, 
 number, and space, extension and motion, — that 
 is to say, when they conceive a relationship 
 among certain phenomena and then proceed to 
 set forth this relationship in the language of the 
 senses, they fall into hypothetical metaphysics, 
 or pseudo-science. They fall into pure meta- 
 physics, or ontology, when, on the other hand, 
 they usurp the function of consciousness and 
 undertake to explain the ultimate reality of things 
 by abstract conceptions. Metaphysics, in general, 
 may thus be defined as an attempt to assume 
 essential authority for the faculties.
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 267 
 
 XXXVI 
 
 We are conscious of our self as both the inner 
 check and the flux, one and many, the same and 
 different. Reason denies this contradictory dual- 
 ism, and, starting with an elimination of one ele- 
 ment of consciousness, proceeds, with the imag- 
 ination, to build up a theory of life and the world 
 based on the other element of consciousness. 
 Thus two schools of pure metaphysics, under var- 
 ious names and disguises, have always existed side 
 by side in irreconcilable hostility — on this side ,. j. 
 thie systems which start from absolute unity, sta-*^/^'^ 
 bility, rest, the universalia ante rem; on the other 
 side the systems of absolute diversity, flux, change, y/pynfS f^ 
 the universalia post rem. It is no contraversion of 
 this fact that the same metaphysician may some- 
 times pass confusedly from one to the other school. 
 Such a confusion will be found to underlie the 
 metaphysics of most of those who maintain the 
 middle ground of universalia in rebus. 
 
 XXXVII 
 
 In this persistent opposition of the two schools 
 of pure metaphysics, we have at once confirma- 
 tion of the dualism of consciousness and evidence 
 that no metaphysical theory will ever unriddle 
 the secret of the world. But neither should it be 
 forgotten that, mixed up with the logomachy 
 of the greater metaphysicians, there has always
 
 268 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 been more or less of true insight, and that their 
 power as guides and consolers of mankind has 
 been proportionate to their immediate vision of 
 the truth. Plato is at times merely the perplex- 
 ing metaphysician; oftener he speaks from the 
 depth of unexampled self-knowledge. All that 
 is essential to the dualistic philosophy may be 
 gathered from his dialogues, as hints and frag- 
 ments of it may be found scattered through in- 
 numerable other writers, especially the inspired 
 poets and philosophers of life. 
 
 XXXVIII 
 
 The modern metaphysic of the one is idealism. 
 Its error is double, in so far as it begins with 
 denying the substantive reality of the flux, and 
 then proceeds to treat the absolute unity of the 
 inner check as if this were the same thing as the 
 rationally conceived and relative unity of the flux 
 which it has denied. 
 
 XXXIX 
 
 The metaphysic of the many has various forms 
 and names. Its most seductive form to-day is 
 that way of viewing life which is commonly called 
 pragmatic. The followers of pragmatism, what- 
 ever their protestations may be, all agree in tak- 
 ing the flux as the whole of consciousness, and in 
 then staying the reason at this point and reject- 
 ing its further function of discretion and combin-
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 269 
 
 ation . They deny the superrational intuition of 
 the absolute and hold fast to the infrarational 
 intuition of the impulses as a continuous stream 
 in time. Truth is to them whatever persists the 
 longest in the unchecked indiscrete experience 
 of life. Their theory, as it is half rational and 
 half intuitional, is unstable and elusive. Its 
 result is to dissolve attention and to discredit 
 discipline. 
 
 « 
 
 Science, when it passes beyond the field of 
 positive observation and metaphysical hypothe- 
 sis into pure metaphysics, is an attempt to formu- 
 late a changeless law of change, to find some 
 absolute cause of unity or development within 
 theflux of nature without projecting into nature 
 the equivalent of the inner check. Chemical 
 atoms, vortices, phlogiston, the corpuscular the- 
 ory of light, luminiferous ether, are examples of 
 science in the hypothetical stage. The concep- 
 tipn of a jjerfect whole made up of an infinite 
 number of imperfect parts, the conception of 
 probability and survival as a principle of or- 
 ganization, are examples of science in transition 
 from the hypothetical to the ontological stage. 
 The deterministic conception of the world as 
 produced by an endless chain of mechanical 
 causes and effects, the vitalistic conception of 
 the world as produced by an absolute and in-
 
 — \ 
 270 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 determinate self-evolution or self-creation, are 
 examples of science in the ontological stage. 
 
 XLI 
 
 Rationalism is the attempt to erect reason 
 into an independent power within the soul 
 taking the place of the inner check. The union 
 of science and rationalism, that is to say, the 
 reassuriiption of nature and the soul under the 
 same law, gives the false philosophy of natural- 
 ism. The two great schools of naturalism in 
 antiquity — and their votaries under various 
 names are still common — were the Epicurean 
 which divided this universal flux into self-moving 
 atoms, and the Stoic which regarded it as a con- 
 tinuous self-governing fluid. Scientific monism is 
 a kind of sterile hybrid from the union of natural- 
 ism and idealism. It need be named, and no 
 
 more. 
 
 XLII 
 
 All these systems of the flux — pragmatism, 
 science, rationalism, naturalism — have a way 
 of merging into one another, and of existing to- 
 gether simultaneously in the same mind. In this 
 indiscriminate sense they pass under the general 
 name of naturalism. 
 
 XLIII 
 
 Romanticism is a radical confusion of the unlim- 
 ited desires and the infinite inner check. In its
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 271 
 
 essential manifestation it is thus a morbid and 
 restless intensification of the personal emotions. 
 When the artistic imagination attempts to em- 
 body this blending of the unlimited and the in- 
 finite, we have the romantic strangeness and 
 vagueness, often accompanied with a peculiarly 
 
 "troubled sense of beauty. In classical art the 
 finite and the infinite are projected together, but 
 without confusion. In so far as romanticism turns 
 
 Jbo emotion away from reason it is opposed to 
 science and rationalism; in so far as it obscures 
 the true infinite it falls with them under natural- 
 ism. Its afhliatio n is w ith the pragmatic flux 
 and the elan vital. 
 
 XLIV 
 
 Thus, by the failure to restrain the faculties to 
 their proper task of developing experience, man is 
 prone to create about himself a world of error and 
 deception — of error in so far as under the sway 
 of reason he introduces unmeaning abstractions 
 and unifications into the soul, of deception in so 
 far as he imagines a world corresponding to this 
 usurpation of reason. 
 
 XLV 
 
 / The safeguard against error and deception is 
 self-knowledge. As self-knowledge maintains a 
 clear and unfailing consciousness of dualism, it is 
 called insight; as it denies the right of the facul-
 
 272 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 ties to supplant this dualism by their own ab- 
 stractions and_ combinationsj itis called scepti- 
 cism. Insight and scepticism are the two arms, 
 the positive and negative aspects, so to speak, of 
 truth. Insight includes at once both the higher, 
 or superrational, intuition which is immediately 
 conscious of the inner check, and the lower, or 
 infrarational, intuition which is immediately con- 
 scious of the flux of impulses. 
 
 XLVI 
 
 Insight and scepticism are not to be identified 
 with doubt, which is a mere lethargy of the facul- 
 ties and may be the mother of wandering and 
 feeble errors and deceptions. True insight and 
 scepticism are extremely difificult to maintain, 
 and the true seers and sceptics are correspond- 
 ingly rare. In all the business of life we are aided 
 by the proper discriminations of the reason and 
 the proper creations of the imagination, and this 
 benefit acts as a continual assault upon the re- 
 straining power. Their insinuations of self-com- 
 petence are endlessly varied and perilous. 
 
 XLVII 
 
 Self-knowledge grows with the exercise of the 
 inner check, and as the inner check has to do with 
 impulses which tend both to mental and to phys- 
 ical activities, self-knowledge results in the one 
 sphere in truth and in the other sphere in morality.
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 273 
 
 The life of truth is philosophy, the life of moral- 
 ity is health {a-uxfypoavvr]) , Philosophy and moral 
 health may not wholly coincide in a man's life, 
 but each is the natural reinforcement of the other, 
 and in their perfection they cannot exist apart. 
 
 XLVIII 
 
 It does not follow, because the metaphysical use 
 of the reason is essentially erroneous, that reason 
 has no proper function in philosophy. In discrim- 
 inating the effects of the inner check in the sphere 
 of the flux, reason is at work from the first act of 
 attention to the last trait of character. It should 
 be observed also that the word reason, especially 
 in the Platonic dialectic, has often been used as 
 synonymous with superrational intuition. 
 
 XLIX 
 
 The sum of a man's desires constitutes his 
 temperament. His disposition is that whole field 
 of impulses which is created by the coming 
 together of his temperament and the stream of 
 outer Impressions7~*"^~ 
 
 If an impulse is checked, a similar recurring 
 impulse is easier to check; if unchecked, the con- 
 trary is true. Thus, by attention and inattention, 
 the disposition of a man takes on a pattern of 
 strength and weakness which we call habits. We
 
 274 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 speak also of the habit of attention, when the 
 habits result from attention ; and of the habit of 
 inattention, when the habits result from inatten- 
 tion. A series of impulses directed towards a par- 
 ticular object constitutes what is called desire, 
 in the common, or secondary, use of the word. 
 Desire, in this sense of the word, may satisfy 
 itself in mental images of possession, or may pass 
 into physical activities for the purpose of actual 
 possession. 
 
 LI 
 
 When a man acts under the habit of attention, 
 there is an elimination of disturbing and thwarting 
 impulses, and he is enabled to display a direct 
 and clear energy which we call the will. This pos- 
 itive force of the will, which is a mode of activity 
 and belongs to the flux, is easily mistaken for the 
 inner check, or original element of inhibition, of 
 which it is the outcome. Since the will is the re- 
 sult of eliminating or refraining detrimental im- 
 pulses, it may, by an easy transference of lan- 
 guage, be called the will to refrain. By this name 
 it is better distinguished from the mere vehemence 
 of desire. 
 
 LII 
 
 A man of character is one in whom a vigorous 
 disposition is continuously controlled by the 
 habit of attention, or the will to refrain. As char- 
 
 A^j=.'4*.-iHrtjerx:^2stti:*
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 275 
 
 acter develops, the disposition takes on a more 
 regular pattern ; the impulses become harmonious 
 as if arranged upon a centre, and display a kind of 
 unity in multiplicity. The outcome in conduct is 
 consistency, self-direction, balance of faculties, 
 efficiency, moral health, happiness. At its highest 
 development the will would appear to act auto- 
 matically, as if the troublesome choice among 
 heterogeneous impulses had been surmounted. 
 The man would no longer be subject to the alter- 
 nations of happiness and misery, but would rise 
 to a state of equable activity in repose which we 
 call peace. Yet withal it must be that life in its 
 perfection would leave something wanting to the 
 soul; some feeling would still pierce through to 
 remind us that happiness in all its stages is at 
 best but a negation of the great angry flux; we 
 know even more clearly as we grow in self-con- 
 trol that the peace of this life is but the shadow 
 and not the substance. Remorse and misery we 
 can certainly outgrow, pain perhaps; but there 
 remains the divine discontent. 
 
 LIII 
 
 In so far as the inner check is not exercised, 
 and in so far as a man acts frorn the unbalanced 
 impulses of the moment, his disposition is said to 
 be impulsive. The conduct of such a man tends 
 to fall into inconsistency, dispersion, discord of 
 faculties, inefficiency, misery. This, in varying
 
 276 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 degrees, is the state of the multitude. The con- 
 summation of such a state would be the very 
 contrary of peace, which is des£air. 
 
 LIV 
 
 In some men the desires flow of themselves 
 strongly in a particular direction. If the will to 
 refrain is correspondingly weak and the impulses 
 are permitted to generate unrestrained habits, 
 such men acquire a violence of disposition, or 
 egotism. As the man of character and the egotist 
 both display a certain stable pattern of habits, 
 they present superficially a similar appearance. 
 But in fact they are essentially the opposite of 
 each other; in practice it is seldom difficult to dis- 
 tinguish immediately between them, and by fam- 
 iliarity the difference comes out stronger. Clear-^ 
 ,ness of aim is not the same as imperious need; 
 inner harmony is not the same as the consistency 
 of a harsh one-sidedness ; strength is not the same 
 as obstinacy; peace is not the same as a sullen 
 pride. In the end the egotist is likely to fall into 
 fatal self-contradictions and misery. 
 
 LV 
 
 The morality or immorality of an agent is de- 
 termined by the exercise or quiescence of the inner 
 check. The rightness or wrongness, virtue or 
 vice, of a particular act is determined by the final 
 result in pleasure or pain to the agent as an indi-
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 277 
 
 vidual existing amid certain circumstances — that 
 is to say, by the harmonious increase of life or the 
 contrary. If the inner check permits full attention 
 on the part of the agent, he will to the best of his 
 experience choose the act which shall result fin- 
 ally in pleasure, and which is therefore right and 
 virtuous. At any moment, even with full atten- 
 tion, he may be mistaken in his opinion and thus 
 be moral while acting wrongly and viciously; but 
 in the long run virtue and morality tend to coin- 
 cide, just as pleasure and happiness tend to coinv 
 cide: they would coincide immediately and abso- 
 lutely were the world itself totally moral. On the 
 other hand, a man may have large experience of 
 virtue and vice and of their consequences, yet at 
 any moment, without the pause of attention 
 (more or less painful and protracted according 
 to his disposition), may be led to act contrary to 
 his own good — video meliora proboqiie, deteriora 
 sequor. His error is due to the force of some 
 insurgent desire, overwhelming temporarily the 
 realization of past and future, or flattering him 
 with sly insinuations that a vice which is harm- 
 ful to others may be innocent to himself. 
 
 LVI 
 
 The discriminating power of reason should 
 seem to be predominant in judging the ultimate 
 outcome of pleasure and pain resultant upon a 
 particular act ; but the faculties of memory and
 
 278 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 imagination are also required, memory in supply- 
 ing the material of judgement, and imagination in 
 lending cogent realness to judgement. In the in- 
 sufficiency of individual experience a man must 
 be largely guided by the experience of society as 
 expressed in precepts. The most useful summary 
 oif experience is the general rule that virtue is a 
 mean lying between the two extremes of vice. 
 Thus, temperance is the mean lying between in- 
 temperance, which is an excess in the indulgence 
 of physical pleasure, and austerity, which is a 
 defect in such indulgence. Courage is the mean 
 lying between rashness, which is an excess of 
 desire to venture or attack, and cowardice, which 
 is a defect of such desire. And so with regard to 
 the other virtues and vices. Essentially, how- 
 ever, the vice of defect is the excess of a contrary 
 desire. Thus, austerity, though in relation to 
 temperance appearing a defect, is in itself an ex- 
 cess of the kind of desire which creates pride; and 
 cowardice, in like manner, is in itself an excess of 
 desire to save one's life. The real defect does not 
 show itself in the vices, properly speaking, but in 
 the lack of elevation, the petty faults, the ignoble 
 hesitations, the tepid dulness, which form the 
 vast background of life. This is meanness as con- 
 trasted with the golden mean, feebleness of tem- 
 perament as contrasted with the control of the 
 inner check.
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 279 
 
 LVII 
 
 To sum up the various aspects of a man's self: 
 — The soul is the total source of individuality, 
 including, properly speaking, the inner check 
 and the desires, and excluding the impressions 
 derived through the body. Temperament is the 
 part of the soul which belongs to the flux ; the soul, 
 unless it is conceived as including the inner check, 
 is indistinguishable from the temperament. Soul 
 and temperament cannot be conceived as actually 
 existing in time yet apart from a body. Disposi- 
 tion is temperament as it works out in conjunc- 
 tion with the body ; it is the energy, so to speak, of 
 our organization. Impulsiveness is a weak dis- 
 position uncontrolled by the inner check. Egotism 
 is a strong disposition uncontrolled by the inner 
 check. Character is disposition controlled by the 
 inner check. Personality is the emotional sense 
 of our disposition as an individual fact different 
 from other dispositions.^ 
 
 LVII I 
 
 As the common disposition of mankind is lack- 
 ing in character, the will to refrain needs to be, 
 and largely is, reinforced from without by the re- 
 straining influence of public opinion, fear of pun- 
 ishment, education, and mythology. The proper 
 eflfect of this external check is a discipline which 
 produces healthy instincts capable, under ordin-
 
 28o THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 ary circumstances, of taking the place of charac- 
 ter. It must be added that the external check, 
 if carried to a point where it crushes instead of 
 regulating the disposition , may be debilitating and 
 dangerous to the purely impulsive man. 
 
 LIX 
 
 As the will to refrain grows with the elimina- 
 tion of conflicting and egotistic impulses, so men 
 of character tend to develop in ways of conduct 
 free from mutual conflict and thus to fall into 
 social accord. Justice, the mother of all the civic 
 virtues, is the will to produce the same balance 
 in society as already exists in the individual. The 
 great source of social discord is the injustice 
 springing from the diversity of unrestrained de- 
 sires and from the warfare of egotisms. 
 
 LX 
 
 There is a common delusion that civic virtue 
 can be produced by instinctive sympathy and 
 does not need the painful restraint of the inner or 
 outer check. Now this sympathy is that supposed 
 law of personality by which we invariably feel 
 the pleasure of others as our pleasure and the 
 pain of others as our pain; and which, conse- 
 quently, would always lead us, if free to follow 
 our instincts, so to act as to affect others with 
 pleasure. But by the very nature of personality 
 such a law cannot exist. Theieeling of pleasure
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 281 
 
 and pain is the sense of the increase or diminution 
 of our life. In so far as the pleasure of another 
 may result in activities beneficial to ourselves, or 
 creates the expectation of similar pleasure in our- 
 selves, and thus enlarges our sense of life, it may 
 awaken sympathetic pleasure in us. And pain in 
 another by a corresponding process may awaken 
 sympathetic pain in us. But, on the contrary, 
 the pleasure of another is equally capable of 
 awakening an antipathetic pain in us, when it 
 means an activity in the other that is detrimental 
 to us and diminishes our sense of life; and the 
 pain of another may awaken an antipathetic 
 pleasure in us. The notion of this instinctive 
 sympathy as a power in itself capable of taking 
 the place of the inner or outer check is an error 
 of romanticism, which forgets that the personal 
 feelings belong to the flux and tend to variety 
 and difference. As it slurs over the distinctions 
 among men in the abstract conception of human- 
 ity, it is called humanitarianism. 
 
 LXI 
 
 Charity, in the scriptural meaning of the word, 
 is justice accompanied with feeling. It is the sure 
 and impersonal sympathy of happiness as dis- 
 tinguished from the precarious and personal 
 sympathy of pleasure.
 
 11.^ 
 
 282 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 LXII 
 
 Friendship and love are special forms of sym- 
 pathy. The lowest form of friendship results from 
 that accident of circumstances by which the 
 pleasures and pains of two persons commonly fall 
 together; its highest form results from a mutual 
 feeling of charity. Love in its lowest form is the 
 mere desire to obtain pleasure from another with- 
 out care for his or her pleasure or pain. In its 
 middle form it desires that the person beloved 
 may have a mutual sense of pleasure. As this 
 sense of mutuality increases, love passes into a 
 peculiarly strong and fine sympathy of charity. 
 The stability of friendship and love grows with 
 their approach to charity. In friendship, and to a 
 higher degree in love, the subjective imagination 
 is a powerful factor in so far, as it embodies our 
 t /emotions in another person. Hence the close rela- 
 > tion of friendship, and the still closer relation of 
 love, to artistic creation. From the pure sympa- 
 thy of charity, more than from any other experi- 
 ence of life, comes the assurance that the rejec- 
 tion of the world's diversity may lead not to blank 
 isolation but to some inexpressible communionof 
 all spirits. 
 
 LXIII 
 
 Society for its preservation organizes the ex- 
 ternal checks in the form of government. A per- 
 fect government would be neither a crushing
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 283 
 
 despotism nor an unrestrained license; its aim 
 would be to bring the character of the few to bear 
 in some effective way upon the impulses of the 
 many; it would be an aristocracy of justice. The 
 theory of absolute democracy might imply that 
 the will to refrain would in the long run assert its 
 inner potency in all men if they were freed from 
 external checks. The generality of men, however, 
 are so intermittently conscious of the inner check 
 that practical dglBQcrtLcy, whether it call itself 
 anarchy or socialism, proceeds on the theory that 
 the dispositions of men tend of themselves to 
 order and harmony; it is in essence a denial of 
 dualism and a child of naturalism. The attempt 
 to introduce either anarchy or socialism, by re- 
 moving the influence of the few men of character, 
 would result in a chaos of clashing dispositions 
 or in the dominance of men of violent egotism. 
 
 LXIV 
 
 It is impossible to give a simple definition of 
 liberty, for the reason that the thing itself is not 
 simple, but complex. Primarily, liberty is an 
 inner state which depends on the complete con- 
 trol of the desires and passions, and in this sense 
 we say: "The truth shall make you free." But 
 liberty is also an outer state which can arise only 
 when society is so organized as to impose no re- 
 straint upon the actions of the man who is him- 
 self free. Were all men free in themselves, the
 
 284 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 perfect form of government would be an absolute 
 anarchy. As the world is, the freest society is 
 , that in which custom and law impose the least 
 restraint upon the man who is self -governed, and 
 the greatest restraint upon the man who is not 
 self-governed. 
 
 LXV 
 
 Individual morality is conduct controlled by 
 the Inner check. Social morality is conduct con- 
 trolled by the external check of society. In gen- 
 eral these two forms of morality are in accord, 
 and, looking at the world at large, we may safely 
 say that individual morality is a minute factor in 
 its conduct in comparison with social morality. 
 When, however, a man has advanced in charac- 
 ter far beyond the character of the community, it 
 may happen that his moral sense will differ widely 
 from the social code. In that case he must rely 
 upon the approval of conscience, which is only 
 another name for self-knowledge developed by 
 the exercise of the inner check. In so transgress- 
 ing the social code he acts at his extreme peril. 
 If he errs, the responsibility is upon himself, since 
 he acts from self-ignorance and not from self- 
 knowledge. 
 
 LXVI 
 
 Since the inner check is the same potentially 
 in all men and differs only in effect as it acts or 
 remains quiescent, each man is certainly respons- 
 ible for his character or lack of character. He
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 285 
 
 may not be responsible for his disposition out of 
 which character is developed, and which by some 
 incalculable chance came to him originally dif- 
 ferent from that of other men. There is thus in 
 conduct a paradox of responsibility and irrespons- 
 ibility corresponding to the dualism of conscious- 
 ness. If we look into ourselves, we are likely to 
 be conscious of voluntary attention or inatten- 
 tion at the root of our habits, and to magnify 
 accordingly the element of responsibility. If we 
 regard the lives of others, we are likely to exagger- 
 ate the power of their disposition, and to regard 
 them as irresponsible. These are the inner and 
 the outer ways of viewing life. 
 
 LXVII 
 
 There are those who wish to escape the idea of 
 responsibility, yet shrink from the terrors of a 
 purely fortuitous world ; such men deny the ele- 
 ment of absolute inhibition on the one hand, and 
 assert on the other that our dispositions come to 
 us determined by the law of inheritance or by 
 some other fatality of the flux itself. This theory 
 merely removes the necessity of meaningless 
 chance to an ever-vanishing distance. Chance 
 and fate, in the deterministic sense, accident and 
 natural law, are not contradictory ideas, but dif- 
 ferent aspects only of the flux. Law, as the rule 
 of cause and effect, has no meaning except in the 
 realm of volition, that is to say, in the irrational
 
 286 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 relation of the inner check and the flux. There is 
 approximate sequence in nature, but no rule of 
 cause and effect except in so far as nature is sub- 
 dued to moral law. 
 
 LXVIII 
 
 On the contrary, not only many individual 
 minds but entire peoples, wishing to bring the 
 whole of conduct under responsibility, have con- 
 ceived the actual disposition of a man as the re- 
 sult of an infinite series of lives, the will in each 
 life being able to modify to a slight extent the 
 inherited temperament. In the infinity of time 
 a man is thus the responsible creator of his own 
 temperament, and, in so far as no impulse can 
 arise without desire, of his disposition. It may 
 be said that this theory of metempsychosis, or 
 the law of karma, merely conceals the difficulty 
 by removing the element of irresponsibility to an 
 ever-vanishing distance. Yet it must not be for- 
 gotten that only by karma can the rule of cause 
 and effect be extended to the whole of life, and 
 that this recognition of responsibility has a deep 
 sanction in tradition. 
 
 LXIX 
 
 The practical difficulty in judging conduct 
 comes from regarding the large things of life 
 instead of the small. Every man knows his free- 
 dom to follow or check the slight insignificant im-
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 287 
 
 pulse when It arises; he loses sight of this freedom 
 when he is impelled In a certain direction by a 
 habit which is the result of innumerable unchecked 
 impulses. In the same way the responsibility for 
 taste lies in the small discriminations of pleasure. 
 The beginning of evil is inattention, or indolence; 
 its middle term is self-ignorance ; its end is either 
 inconsequence or excess, dissipation of character 
 or egotism. Insight never forgets the beginning 
 in the end, or the end in the beginning. 
 
 LXX 
 
 In all this philosophy of Insight there is a con- 
 stant assumption which has not been explained. 
 What is this distinction of good and evil, of bene- 
 fit and detriment, with which the action or inac- 
 tion of the Inner check Is concerned? It might be 
 answered that good is harmony, or self-consist- 
 ency. Amid the ceaseless change and hetero- 
 geneous motion of the flux the effect of the inner 
 check is to call a certain pause and so to create 
 the opportunity of fusing a present and a past 
 jmpulse. If these impulses are dissimilar they will 
 counteract each other. If they are similar they 
 will combine. Such a reinforced Impulse will be 
 stronger than single unreinforced Impulses; it 
 will tend to gather to itself other similar impulses 
 and thus to make a wave of harmony in the 
 stream. As a man Is not alone but is a part of the 
 universe, this particular wave will be reinforced
 
 288 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 ' in so far as it corresponds with other harmonies 
 outside of himself, so that by a common check, or 
 
 ij negation, a single uniform harmony, or good, 
 tends to pervade the universal flux. But such a 
 theory leaves the essential difficulty unsolved. 
 Why is harmony strong or good? Are we not 
 really starting with the assumption of a universal 
 good and then working round to it under another 
 name? And why, even if such a good is assumed, 
 does the inner check stay an impulse until a simi- 
 lar impulse arises and thereupon cease its em- 
 bargo? If the inner check is itself an act of 
 attention or choice, it is not purely negative, but 
 positive; if it works positively within the flux, 
 it is not a pure absolute, but is itself subject to 
 variation ; and we are left with only the universal 
 world of change, without meaning or purpose or 
 value. In brief, the philosophy of dualism does 
 not attempt, as do the metaphysical systems, to 
 explain the coexistence of good and evil ; neither 
 does it undertake to bridge the gulf, which reason 
 cries upon us to bridge, between negation and 
 affirmation, the one and the many. We know 
 that there is within us a stream of impulses flow- 
 ing from abyss to abyss, which we call positive 
 evil. We know that there is also within us a 
 negative power of pause, the inner check, which 
 we call absolute good. The order of natural life 
 and nature, formed so to speak by eddies in the 
 stream, at once changing and stable, we call rela-
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 289 
 
 Jive good; implying thereby that it belongs 
 purely to neither element of our being alone, but 
 springs from an incomprehensible relation of the 
 two elements. Of this relative world we have no 
 true knowledge, but only opinion. To go beyond 
 this insight and this scepticism is to pass from 
 philosophy to religion. «^ 
 
 LXXI 
 
 Certain men have reported that with the attain- 
 ment of perfect peace the soul can rise into a state 
 wherein the desires cease altogether, and the 
 other element of consciousness, as the higher Self 
 or infinite spirit, abides in blissful liberation. 
 This is the region of mysticism, towards which 
 all philosophy and all religion point; it is akin 
 to idealism in so far as idealism also pretends to 
 start from a conception of the absolute, but it 
 differs from idealism in so far as it is a real know- 
 ledge of victory over the flux and not a rational 
 denial of the flux which immediately falls into a 
 confusion of absolute and relative unity. Mysti- 
 cism surpasses the common knowledge of man- 
 kind, and its beatitude is not the happiness of 
 human speech. The discipline of character by 
 which we are prepared for the transcendental state 
 is manifest, but the actual attainment is a leap 
 into the void, a miraculous transition or ecstasy, 
 to which many names have been given, but all 
 inadequate. We seem sometimes in the hushed
 
 ago THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 serenity of death to look, as it were, upon a vis- 
 ible symbol of the eternal rest. 
 
 LXXII 
 
 The complete attainment of the mystical state 
 would mean the cessation of natural existence, 
 but to all of us moments may come when the con- 
 f sciousness of the inner check is so overpowering 
 S ks seemingly to sever the continuity of our im- 
 ■J pulsive life. The memory of these visionary mo- 
 ments, even the assurance that such vision is 
 possible, brings to the mind a sense of the posi- 
 tive quality of that inhibitive element of con- 
 /sciousness which otherwise possesses unity only 
 /through its negation of qualities. This conver- 
 sion, by which the heart of man is brought to 
 recognize the inner check as the constantly in- 
 dwelling spirit, is called Jaith. By faith the ever- 
 lasting No becomes the everlasting Yea. Faith is 
 thus not the will to believe, but the flower of that 
 insight, or self-knowledge, which grows with the 
 will to refrain. Neither is it the arbitrary belief, 
 contrary to experience, that all is right. Its goal 
 is the liberation from dualism, but its source is 
 in the consciousness of a dualism which embraces 
 the possibility of infinite evil as well as infinite 
 good. Faith, to those who crave a definite answer 
 to the demands of reason and of theTmaglnation^, 
 may seem vague and unreal. In a truer sense it is 
 the most definite and real thing in life, in so far as
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 291 
 
 it implies a co nstant intention of character in one 
 direction. 
 
 LXXIII 
 
 As the counterpart of insight is scepticism, 
 so the counterpart of faith is disillusion — the 
 knowledge that this apparent order of the world 
 is not of the world itself, and that beneath the 
 surface of all we see and feel, beneath the very act 
 of seeing and feeling, lies the unredeemed chaos 
 of desires and impressions, unlimited, unmeaning, 
 unfathomable, incalculable, formless, dark. Life 
 is but appearance, and this personality we call 
 by our name is but illusion within illusion. As by 
 reason the inner check can be defined only in 
 negative terms, so to the eye of faith the flux 
 and all its manifestations, including r eason itse lf, 
 become the absolute negation. 
 
 We are such stuff 
 As dreams are made on, and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep. 
 
 LXXIV 
 
 In some men, especially in an age of spiritual 
 apathy, the sense of disillusion may spring up 
 without the corresponding assurance of faith. To 
 such men nothing is real ; they walk in a place of 
 shadows, and feel that life is continually slipping 
 away from them into a bottomless abyss. All 
 their labour is to re-create for themselves the illu-
 
 292 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 sion which has been shattered, or, by ceaseless 
 occupation, to escape the dull horror of the void. 
 Because this tedium of the soul is due to an in- 
 ability on their part to surmount the materialism 
 that encompasses them, they are prone to take 
 their revenge by turning upon the world with 
 cynical bitterness. 
 
 LXXV 
 
 The mystical state is an existence in eternity 
 released from time, and as a man grows in faith 
 he feels himself lifted above the scorn of the 
 hypocritic days. There is an aspect of mysticism 
 in the faculty of memory, in so^far as things re- 
 membered may be dissociated from relation to 
 the evermoving present and set outside of the 
 flux of time. The consolations of faith are wont 
 to be stronger in remembrance of the past than 
 in the actuality of the present. Romantic recol- 
 
 V lection is a dangerous parody of this doctrine. 
 
 • it is a retreat into the "tower of Ivory" to 
 brood over past sensations. 
 
 LXXVI 
 
 The hope of immortality is a longing to give 
 to the future the mystical virtue of the past; it 
 is the yearning for a life which is a continuously 
 moving present yet freed from the tyrannous 
 flux of time. The happiness of immortality is 
 thus, speaking absolutely, an impossibility, but
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 293 
 
 in emotional anticipation it may be merely a 
 name for the eternal liberation of the spirit. Nor 
 does such an argument against absolute immor- 
 tality imply the immediate dissociation of the 
 personal elements of the soul with the dissolution 
 of the material body at death. There is nothing 
 to show that these elements may not subsist to- 
 gether as an individual entity joined with some 
 ethereal body for an indefinite period of time; 
 there are intimations that they do so subsist. 
 
 LXXVII 
 
 Asceticism is the attempt to attain the mysti- 
 cal release by violence rather than by the gradual 
 discipline of philosophy and morality. It will 
 appear that the dominant force in the ascetic life is 
 almost always some overweening pride or vanity 
 or hope or fear, some exorbitance of egotism, and 
 not the true will to refrain. Asceticism is thus 
 liable to an equally violent relapse into uncon- 
 trolled impulses. There is also a false mysticism 
 which seeks to lose the consciousness of paradox- 
 ical dualism in absolute surrender to the flux. This 
 is the temptation of antinomianism. If attained 
 it would mean the complete disorganization of 
 character and the utter dissipation of death. The 
 peril of the mystical path is profounder than the 
 error of rationalism.
 
 294 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 LXXVIII 
 
 Faith and disillusion are the positive and neg- 
 ative aspects of spirituaUty, as insight and scep- 
 ticism are the positive and negative aspects of 
 truth. Insight can exist without faith, and scep- 
 ticism without disillusion ; but faith and disillusion 
 cannot exist without the lower forms from which 
 they spring. The life of spirituality is religion ; it 
 is attended with a heightened sense of morality. 
 Pure religion is thus philosophy and moral health 
 raised to a consciousness of the infinite meaning 
 ^of unity and diversity. It is a conscious submis- 
 sion of the personal elements of the soul to the 
 spirit, bringing to the soul a happiness composed 
 of a strange mingling of humility and self-appro- 
 val. By this self-surrender to the higher Self, we 
 understand the meaning of the words. In la sua 
 voluntade h nostra pace, and of that older say- 
 ing, " He that loseth his life for my sake shall 
 find it." In common practice religion is a com- 
 plicated mood into which enter in varying de- 
 grees insight and faith, scepticism and disillusion, 
 morality and mythology. Holiness is spirituaUty 
 coloured by mythology. 
 
 LXXIX 
 
 Mythology is the act_of_ the imagination by 
 which we people the world with daemonic beings 
 made in the likeness of our own souls. It is either
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 295 
 
 rational or spontaneous according as it follows 
 the dictates of reason or itself takes the lead. 
 
 LXXX 
 
 Rational mythology varies with the theories of 
 reason. It is pantheistic when it imagines a god V 
 after the abstractions of idealism; panpsychic 
 under pragmatism; deistic under science and 
 rationalism; in general, naturalistic under nat- 
 uralism. The deity of rational mythology, as it 
 corresponds to an abstract conception of the 
 inner life, is vaguely personal and is barely dis- 
 tinguished from the metaphysical hypotheses of 
 science. The insufficiency and falseness of all 
 these theories are shown by the fact that they 
 leave no room for the reality of sin and suffering 
 in the world. They do not properly surmount 
 evil, but ignore it or attempt to explain it away. 
 
 LXXXI 
 
 Spontaneous mythology is the unreasoned 
 work of the imagination projecting our imperfect 
 self-knowledge into the void in the form of 
 deemonic personalities. This imagined world is 
 closely akin to art and literature, but differs 
 from them in so far as it is evoked more immedi- 
 ately from the two elements of consciousness. It 
 is, too, less the deliberate creation of the indi- 
 vidual and more the joint product of society. To 
 the individual, therefore, it seems to be independ-
 
 296 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 ent of his own faculties and often verges upon hal- 
 , lucination. Belief is the acceptance of the creations 
 of my thology as real ; it is not to be identified with 
 faith, any more than mythology is to be identi- 
 fied with religion. 
 
 LXXXII 
 
 The beginning of spontaneous mythology is 
 polytheism. As self-knowledge grows, the dae- 
 monic world tends to fall into two opposed hosts 
 or personalities, which represent the dual ele- 
 ments of consciousness as hostile powers of good 
 and evil. 
 
 LXXXIII 
 
 \ In Christianity mythology takes the form of a 
 perfectly righteous deity set over against the 
 totally depraved human soul. The idea of a 
 triune God is an imaginative blending of the 
 three faculties and the inner check. In the con- 
 ception of a Christ who is one person having two 
 natures, divine and human, there is an attempt 
 to maintain the actuality of this mythology and 
 at the same time to restore it symbolically to the 
 dualism of man's consciousness. The atonement 
 through the sacrifice of Christ's human nature is 
 a symbol of the painful control of the flux by the 
 inner check, ending in the mystical state of lib- 
 eration. By belief in the act of Christ we are 
 assured of our own ultimate control of our impuls-
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 297 
 
 Ive nature, which in mythology is regarded as 
 sin, or disobedience to the law of God. So a man 
 is said to attain to salvation, or justification, by 
 faith, meaning by belief. The insoluble paradox 
 of grace and free-will is the mythological coun- 
 terpart of the relation of the inner check and 
 attention: in either case there is an appeal to 
 the personal element of the soul to act on its own 
 initiative as it can only act under the control 
 of a power not itself. 
 
 LXXXIV 
 
 Worship is an act designed to fortify belief 
 with emotion, and thus to make of mythology 
 a personal possession of the soul. In its higher 
 Christian type it is an act, public or private, for 
 the purpose of glorifying God and humiliating 
 sinful human nature. The commonest cere- 
 mony of worship is a more or less symbolic sacri- 
 fice, which in Christianity takes the form of the 
 eucharist. 
 
 LXXXV 
 
 The purest form of spontaneous mythology, 
 the form that approaches most nearly to abso- 
 lute religion, is the simple belief in an infinite 
 unseen God, source and goal of the human spirit, 
 and the unquestioning acceptance of the marks 
 of order and beauty in nature as the footsteps of 
 the creator in a world which, without his presence,
 
 298 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 would sink into the bleak confusion of chaos. 
 The weakness of this bare monotheism is the 
 danger that, while surrendering the comforts of 
 tradition and the richer interpretations of ex- 
 perience, it may fall short of the higher mystic 
 faith. 
 
 LXXXVI 
 
 Theology is an attempt to superimpose the 
 abstracting activity of metaphysics upon the 
 personal dualism of spontaneous mythology. Its 
 high theme is the nature of God and of evil. 
 Theologians have ransacked language for words 
 that will define a being who is at once, and in the 
 same substance, both infinite and personal, but 
 they can no more do this than we can express 
 the inner check in terms of the flux. With equal 
 zeal theologians have tried to reconcile the belief 
 in a benevolent and all-powerful creator with the 
 insistent sense of evil in the world, but they can 
 no more do this than we can express the flux as 
 a property of the inner check. Theology thus 
 involves a self-destructive process, and either 
 kills mythology or abdicates in a superstition 
 which has lost connection with our better inner 
 life. When mythology ends, either rationalism or 
 insight steps in. For most men the consequence 
 of theology is a state of fluctuation between 
 rationalism and superstition.
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 299 
 
 LXXXVII 
 
 The great mystery of existence is the relation 
 of the human soul to nature, and on that naked 
 mystery rest the reality of faith and the symbol- 
 ism of belief. The soul, whatever may be its ver- 
 bal creed, is conscious of dualism; consciousness 
 and dualism for the soul are, indeed, synonym- 
 ous terms. Nature, on the contrary, appears to 
 be unconscious, yet to display some of the same 
 qualities as follow the dualism of the soul. From 
 the abhorrence of this paradox the mind seeks 
 refuge in metaphysics and theology. To-day the 
 popular word to conjure by is evolution, that is, 
 the attempt to conceal the paradox by involving 
 it in the long operations of time. But evolution, 
 conceived as a purely mechanical process which 
 would reduce the soul to uniformity with nature 
 by denying dualism altogether, is refuted by con- 
 sciousness. And evolution, conceived as the work . 
 of some immanent final cause which would raise '^'^*^' ^*' 
 nature into conformity with the soul, must accept 
 the apparent absurdity of regarding all nature as 
 endowed with consciousness. It cannot properly 
 hold that consciousness is a gradual product of 
 development ; for consciousness is a fundamental 
 reality, and cannot be conceived as springing 
 unevoked from any unconscious reality. By a 
 kind of compromise it is possible to say that con- 
 sciousness suddenly intervenes at some point in
 
 300 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 the development of nature as a deus ex machina, 
 but this is to break the chain of evolution and 
 merely explains the unknown by the unknown. 
 When we undertake to^ form_a conception of na- 
 ture as a whole, we are compelled by the faculty 
 of memory to regard it as a sequence in time, 
 just as we are compelled by reason and imagina- 
 _ti^on to regard it as extension in space. So far 
 evolution is properly the scientific complement 
 to physics. But the attempt to involve con- 
 sciousness and morality in this natural sequence 
 is doomed to failure. The presumption of ante- 
 evolutionary science declared that whatever is 
 is right. The presumption of evolutionary sci- 
 ence declares that whatever is is better than 
 what was. In either case science, so soon as it 
 passes beyond the classification of phenomena to 
 a naturalistic philosophy, is a liar and the father 
 of lies. Better the frank unreason of mythology 
 than this labyrinth of intellectual deception. 
 
 LXXXVIII 
 
 Scepticism has its part in religion as well as 
 in philosophy. On the one hand, it withholds us 
 from accepting the creations of the mythological 
 imagination as the exact counterpart of reality, 
 and is the foe of credulity and fanaticism; on 
 the other hand, it restrains us from asserting 
 positively that there is nothing at the heart of 
 mythology which corresponds to a variously in-
 
 DEFINITIONS OF DUALISM 301 
 
 terpreted revelation of the order of the universe- 
 Its action upon a spontaneous mythology, corre- 
 sponding to the dualism of self-knowledge, is thus 
 to hold the mind in a state of suspense, whereas it 
 acts as an absolute negation upon theology and 
 rational mythology which spring from presump- 
 tuous self-ignorance. 
 
 LXXXIX 
 
 With scepticism goes the true humility of relig- 
 ion, which is ready to join devoutly in any genu- 
 inely traditional worship, trusting that in this 
 way faith may be enriched and the indolence of 
 doubt expelled. No man, without peril to his 
 religious life, can do violence to his mythological 
 instinct. Faith should develop gradually out of 
 belief, and pure spirituality out of holiness, as 
 a man grows in self-knowledge and character. 
 There are few men, but one man here and there, 
 who can rise to the clear vision of faith unsup- 
 ported by belief in a God. Religion is equally 
 endangered by atheism and by belief in a God 
 who corresponds, not to the developing know- 
 ledge of the inner check, but to some rationalistic 
 denial of dualism. 
 
 XC 
 
 Self-recollection is the quiet and deliberate 
 gathering of the mind from the many to the one. 
 Prayer is the same act directed to the one im-
 
 302 THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM 
 
 agined as the infinite, eternal God. A great need 
 of mankind is for mor e^jrecoUection or prayer. 
 Therein shall a man learn to know the truth of 
 his own being and see with open eyes the infinite 
 consequences to himself of that truth ; and from 
 thence he shall go out into the world armed with 
 power and assured in peace. Through the distrac- 
 tions and trials of life he shall carry with him the 
 secret possession of religious philosophy, which 
 has been called the amor dei intellectualis; rather, 
 to him belongs the praise of Plato: "Show me 
 a man able to see both the one and the many 
 in nature, and I will follow in his footsteps as 
 though he were a god." 
 
 THE END
 
 Shelburne Essays 
 
 BY PAUL ELMER MORE 
 CONTENTS 
 
 First Series : A Hermit's Notes on Thoreau — The Solitude 
 of Nathaniel Hawthorne — The Origins of Hawthorne and 
 Foe — The Influence of Emerson — The Spirit of Carlyle — 
 The Science of English Verse — Arthur Symons ; The Two Il- 
 lusions — Th e Epic of Ireland — Two Poets of the Irish Move- 
 ment — Tolstoy • or, The Ancient Feud between Philosophy 
 and Art — The Religious Ground of Humanitarianism. 
 
 Second Series: Elizabethan Sonnets — Shakespeare's Son- 
 nets — Lafcadio Hearn — The First Complete Edition of 
 Hazlitt — Charles Lamb — Kipling and FitzGerald — George 
 Crabbe — The Novels of George Meredith — Hawthorne: 
 Looking before and after — Delphi and Greek Literature — 
 Nemesis • or, The Divine Envy. 
 
 Third Series: The Correspondence of William Cowper — 
 Whittier the Poet — The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve — The 
 Scotch Novels and Scotch History — Swinburne — Chris- 
 tina Rossetti — Why is Browning Popular? — A Note on 
 Byron's "Don Juan" — Laurence Sterne — J.Henry Short- 
 house — The Quest. 
 
 Fourth Series; The Vicar of Morwenstow — Fanny Burney 
 
 — A Note on " Daddy " Crisp — George Herbert — John 
 Keats — Benjamin Franklin — Charles Lamb again — Walt 
 Whitman — William Blake — The Theme of "Paradise 
 Lost" — The Letters of Horace Walpole. 
 
 Fifth Series : The Greek Anthology — The Praise of Dick- 
 ens — George Gissing — Mrs. Gaskell — Philip Freneau — 
 Thoreau 's Journal — The Centenary of Longfellow — Don- 
 ald G. Mitchell —James Thomson (•' B. V.") —Chesterfield 
 
 — Sir Henry Wotton. 
 
 Sixth Series {Sttidies of Religious Dualism). The Forest 
 Philosophy of India — The Bhagavad Gita — Saint Augus- 
 tine — Pascal — Sir Thomas Browne — Bunyan — Rousseau 
 
 — Socrates — The Apology — Plato, 
 
 Seventh Series : Shelley — Wordsworth — Hood — Tenny- 
 son — William Morris — Ix)uisa Shore — Thomas Bailey Al- 
 drich — Francis Thompson — The Socialism of G. Lowes 
 Dickinson — The Pragmatismof William James — Criticism 
 
 — Victorian Literature. 
 
 Eighth Series ( The Drift of Romanticism) : William Beck- 
 ford — Cardinal Newman — Walter Pater — Fiona Macleod 
 
 — Nietzsche — Huxley — Definitions of Dualism.
 
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 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 U . S . A
 
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 NIVERSITY OF CA , RIVERSIDE LIBRARY 
 
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