Reason and understanding, with philosophy and science as organs, originate order. Feeling and fantasy, with religion and art as organs, have as their content the unclassifiable, the irreplaceable, the intimately personal.

If there are to be science and philosophy, there must be investigators and thinkers with trained intellects. If there are to be religion and art, there must be prophets, redeemers, saints, heroes, geniuses, in whom feeling, will, fantasy predominate: Euclid and IsaiahEuclid, naturally cool, objective, practical, passionless,—in a word, the classicist; Isaiah, temperamental, impressionistic, enthusiastic, eminently personal. Classicism wants eternal truth; Romanticism, intimations, interpretations of what is coming, unraveling the fate of peoples, admonition and edification.

Classicism expresses itself in the Church as orthodoxy, in politics as conservatism; romanticism, as radicalism in both. The caricature of classicism is Nirvana; the caricature of romanticism is Utopia. Classicism ossifies; romanticism volatilizes. In extreme classicism the waters are dammed back to an unruffled pool in which the miasma of rottenness and decay are at home. In extreme romanticism, the waters swell to a wild torrent which tears down all the dams of historical tradition, and overflows all the walls of convention and legality, rule and law, right and custom, religion and morality, asset and institution, in order to bury everything historical underneath the debris.

This is the eternal theme of the history of the world,-this never-ending conflict between personality, for which romanticism. stands, and race, for which classicism stands; between self-preservation and race-preservation; between human precept and natural order of the world; between instinct and ideal; between anarchism and socialism; in a word, between motion, for which romanticism stands, and rest, for which classicism stands; between Messiah and Nirvana; between the wintry peace of the old church-yard, and the awakening life of springtime. Classicism-like geometry, which has to do with fixed figures in space, according to unchangeable laws; Romanticism-like biology, which has to do with the cell that lives and grows; co-existence and succession, order and progress; stationariness on the one hand, rhythm and periodicity on the other. Thus the everlasting tick-tock of the clock of history and of personal life goes on.

After a century, romanticism is triumphant again. Who are exponents of romanticism and mysticism, rather than of classicism

and rationalism? Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Coleridge, Carlyle, Emerson, Ruskin, Morris, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Huysmans and Maurice Maeterlinck. The latter is the present philosopher of romantic mysticism.

The old romanticism, certainly on its religious side, was best represented by Novalis, the poet of the fanatic love for Christ. The hymn, "Thou, O Christ, art all I want." is characteristic of him. But he composed hymns to Mary, intimate and tender as a Catholic could wish, though himself not a Catholic. He knew well the weak points in Luther's position, he said that Luther's Bible-religion was poor, pedantic, empty, scanty, and he paved the way for freer and fairer appreciation of the wealth and worth of Catholicism.

Novalis was neither a Bible-believing Protestant, nor a Churchbelieving Catholic. He was the poet of the devout human heart, of an immediate religious experience of one's very own. But he was abnormal-pathological in mind and body-as is seen in his hymn to Night after tragic love affairs of his youth. He turned from light to darkness. Daylight was glaring and cruel, hiding his beloved from him. Therefore he fled into the arms of Night, to be embraced with their inexpressible, mysterious darkness. In that darkness the sun of his love shone. He could raptuously embrace and marry the form that the day snatched from him. Night was life to him; day was death.

Fantasy against the understanding, you see. Dream against reality awake. Fantasy creates a life which the understanding denies,— forms, dream images which dwell in the wishland of the soul. But the understanding destroys these images and this land as illusion and unreality. "How beautiful and lovely and dear!" cries the man of fantasy. "Yes, but it is not true, not real!" sneers the man of intellect.

And yet, does not the romanticist help one side of life into its rights a side that would wither and decay under the sole supremacy of pure reason? Still fantasy, divorced from intellect, becomes lawless, unbridled. It puts forward its dream constructions as realities and would obligate us to the unreal. In order to be able to live in the kingdom of dreams, it bids farewell to the penetrating, critical understanding.

To be sure, ecclesiastical piety has not done this entirely. Indeed, calumniating reason, it uses reason though limiting it. Even when the Church says, "believe because it is absurd," reason is active, because it is reason that is expected to determine what it is that is

absurd. The Catholic mystic also remains rational in his mysticism. What he wants is a higher reason, a purer light.

The Protestant romanticist, however, would like to put out every light, that nothing might disturb fantasy as it lingers in the world of dreams. This is pathological; it manifests itself in clairvoyance, spiritualism, and the like. This folly produces an over-heating and over-stimulating of fantasy. Sunlight and tasks of daytime become pain and burden. In the name of Faith, spook forms are sought after, which are the creations of one's own diseases. These are sense images which fantasy produces, but sense only in color and form, without flesh and blood, without genuine, living sensuousness.

Therefore, the soul of the romanticist is consumed in this torturing contradiction of a sensibly felt love, which yet lacks an object tangible to the senses. Perhaps the Christ whom the soul loves cannot be apprehended and sung more sensibly than was the case with Novalis. The poet sees his Christ corporeally by his side, or walking before him. The contact of the sacramental bread with his lips is a kiss of Christ, the beloved.

Thus Novalis writes: "The Christian religion is the religion of bliss, of voluptuousness even; sin is the greatest stimulus to love the Deity. The more sinful a man feels, the more Christian he is." The poet thinks that everything that is best begins with disease. Half disease is an evil; whole disease is blissful and higher pleasure. He says again: "The value of perfect health is merely scientifically interesting. Disease individualizes us. Disease distinguishes man from animals. Suffering belongs to man. The more helpless a man is, the more receptive he is for morality and religion." And thus a conception of life began here which did not fight disease as exceptional. Pathological natures were supposed to be of a higher and finer organization, more spiritual than were the robust and healthy. Thus the decadent, the neurotic, the erotic, was the higher type of

man.

Feeling-feeling: that is everything. No clear thought, no strong, firm will; only feeling-feeling that revels in itself; no worth but feeling-feeling that incites to erotic love, to the stormy desire of an unsatisfied, insatiable sensuality.

This Novalis called die blaue Blume, the blue flower, which he and his hero went out to seek-the wunder Blume which satisfied his insatiable longing; not the strong yearning of the will which longed for deeds, but the impotent yearning of the feeling; after every new feeling a yearning which artificially stings itself, in order

to be intoxicated with the fragrance of the blue flower-with its own self; and, drunk in such yearning, flees the world of reality.

It is easy to see that there is something wrong with this old romanticism,—a heavy, close atmosphere in which we cannot breathe freely. But what is it that is wrong? There is immediacy and inwardness, fineness and depth, attractive as against our hard and external practicality. That is in its favor. Our theologians have excogitated a faith in which there is no mystery, no unfathomable deep, a faith in which everything is proved, made clear by sacred letter and formula.

In romanticism faith turns back into the world of the heart. In romanticism faith seeks union again with original life, with the soul's capacity for intuition and intimation. Faith needs picture and parable, the language of poesy, and would make peace with the senses. Therefore Novalis said: "The history of Christ is as much poesy as history, and only that history can be history at all which can also be fable."

Yet romanticism is, at best, a half truth. Feeling sunders the union with the understanding and the will, whereas it is only all together that make the human spirit. Romanticism is like an organism that would nourish only one organ-the heart-at the expense of all the other organs, and on that very account even the heart itself would deteriorate.

The new romanticism, of which Maeterlinck is the great exponent, is separated, however, from the old by more than two generations, a period of deep significance for all civilization. The French Revolution and our American War of Independence, two catastrophes from which the new world was born, assigned new tasks and set new goals to national life everywhere. Political society henceforth has to safeguard and nourish freedom; has to be germinative and formative of freedom.

Still, ideas clashed: the Bastille was stormed for the sake of freedom; yet freedom, at the same time, created the foundation on which the imperial throne of the Corsican was erected. Then freedom fled from the political world, in which it was outlawed, into that other world of poesy; it remembered the kingdom of dreams over which no Corsican or Czar ruled, where fantasy swayed the sceptre.

In this world, man still felt that he was a glorious being on his own account. As poet, he felt that he had the capacity to escape all limits of earthly requirements, and to mock all the forces that would coerce him. But this fantasy still came from a world of unfreedom

and still lived on the memory of its origin. Therefore, its poetic forms wore the garb of slavery, from which men still sought release, -the garb of the mediaeval past, the garb of the romanticism in whose golden light all sacred and secular citadels were asylums of light and freedom.

And when now the growing reactionary spirit, the spirit of darkness, desired a garment of light in which it could be clothed, romanticism offered it what it needed,— the shimmering splendor and irishued veil, under which the true nature of a rule by might, throttling freedom, might be concealed.

The spirit of freedom, however, created new forms, walked new paths which ran counter to all romanticism, apparently to all life of freedom as well. This was no romanticism,-to fight on barricades, and hunger and perish in dungeons. And what remained of this freedom, even of the romantic spirit itself, was entirely lost to men, children and grand-children. They saw that there were powers by which every stress and impulse of the soul to freedom was destroyed. And the man who still sang his song of freedom so proudly, preached to the world the new gospel that there was no freedom at all, that the individual, down to the most hidden stirrings of his soul, was bound under law, the laws of nature and society; that even his thought and his will were totally dependent, an effect of causes, from whose inviolable order there was no escape for man.

Even art made peace with this gospel of dependence and restriction. It was articulated in the bony structure of nature and society and upborne by their forces. Art became materialistic, realistic, and thereby stripped of the last shimmer of the old romanticism. Art did not seem art any longer to all those who did not know art without romanticism. Instead of the world of fairy tales, raw reality!— the world where the clatter and hammer of machines, the smoke of chimney stacks, banished all romantic ideas, where hard class-war, struggle for existence, awoke man from all his romantic dreaming.

Now, however, freedom begins to stir in man again. He seeks the freedom in the inner life which is denied him in the outer. A new romanticism begins. It opposes another world, the world of the heart, over against the world given in nature and naturalistically apprehended. This new romanticism is convinced that the world of the feelings is truer and more real than the outer alien world, that in the inevitable conflict of the two worlds one's own inner world must win the victory over the outer and alien world.

In this new romanticism religion wears a different countenance.