ROMANTICISM. MODERN FRENCH. The romantic view of the world, which may be described as Roman ticism, has been well described by William James. "Look at the last runnings of the romantic school, as we see them in that strange contemporary Parisian literature. with which we of the less clever countries are so often driven to rinse out our minds after they have become clogged with the dulness and heaviness of our native pursuits. The romantic school began with the worship of subjective sensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was the first great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, right wings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renan and M. Zola, as its principal exponents —one speaking with its masculine, and the other with what might be called its feminine, voice. I prefer not to think now of less noble members of the school, and the Renan I have in mind is, of course, the Renan of latest dates. As I have used the term gnostic, both he and Zola are gnostics of the most pronounced sort. Both are athirst for the facts of life, and both think the facts of human sensibility to be of all facts the most worthy of attention. Both agree, moreover, that sensibility seems to be there for no higher purpose—certainly not, as the Philistines say, for the sake of bringing •mere out ward rights to pass and frustrating outward wrongs. One dwells on the sensibilities for their energy, the other for their sweetness; one speaks with a voice of bronze. the other with that of an a.'ollan harp; one ruggedly ignores the distinction of good and evil, the other plays the coquette between the craven unmanliness of his Philosophic Dialogues and the butterfly optimism of his Souvenirs de Jeunesse. But under the pages of both
there sounds incessantly the hoarse bass of vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas, which the reader may hear. whenever be will, between the lines. No writer of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from the hour of satiety with the things of life—the hour in which we say, ' I take no pleasure in them '—or from the hour of terror at the world's vast meaningless grinding, if per chance such hours should come. For terror and satiety are facts of sensibility like any others: and at their own hour they reign in their own right. The heart of the romantic utterances, whether poetical, critical, or his torical, is this inward remedilessness, what Carlyle calls this far-off whimpering of wail and woe. And from this romantic state of mind there is absolutely no possible theoretic escape. Whether, like Renan, we look upon life in a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like the friends of M. Zola. we pique our selves on our scientific' and analytic ' character, and prefer to be cynical, and call the world a ' roman experi mental ' on an infinite scale—in either case the world appears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, a vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death." See William James, The Will to Believe, 190S.