•*m %ty jl?eto i&omantictem in ^canDinatoian Hettets D. JI3ptoall : - €be jReto ftomanttcfam in ^canOtnauian Hettets By 2D. jUpball Chicago, Illinois [Page Left Blank] A ptologue Man Is a Fraction J#AN is but a fraction. There is nothing which human history teaches more clear­ ly than the fact that man is insufficient to become a sum total even of his own possibilities. Man's onesidedness is appalling. It is a part of his nature. It is a part of his greatness. In most cases genius means one particular faculty overdeveloped. A great man is, therefore, a very faulty man. He is the common man very much enlarged, warts and all. Man is a cripple by nature, and even more so by education. None is born a whole man. There is no such a thing as a type in embryo. Man is never a type, but an average. Man is specialized from the start. And yet he is more nearly whole in the cradle than ever after. An 3 acorn, said Boström, is bigger than an oak. Why I Because the acorn contains more nearly all the possibilities of an oak than any fullgrown tree in the for­ est. A baby is more nearly a total man than he ever will become in any succeed­ ing season of life. Education is not summing man up but rather splitting him into so many de­ tails, leaving as man's highest attain­ ments not a total man but a residue, one chip as it were out of the original block. Education too often tends to develop man's head at the expense of his chest, his brains at the expense of his heart, his thinking quality at the expense of activity, his speed at the expense of di­ rection and safety, and vice versa. For an upward flight the forward march is neglected. Very few become idealists but at the expense of all the good on earth, or realists but at the price of heaven. If a conservative, man blindly pursues the shadows of yesterday; if a progressive, he just as blindly pursues the spectres of to-morrow. Specializing in wit and intellectuality, he spends his time at the fireside, spinning endless yarns of fine theories, with never a knot 4 of decision. If an executive, he becomes an explosive acting all the time, with no chance for thought, and therefore result­ ing in nothing particular. In brief, man in his sad lack of totality resembles the locomotive which actually has to stop going every time it whistles, not having steam enough to do both at a time. Where and when did we ever find a total man or even a man so well bal­ anced, that he had the perfect use of all his faculties, such as they are? Diog­ enes sought for such a man diligently among the Athenians, lantern in hand in broad daylight, with no success recorded. Solomon, the wisest of men, acknowledges his practical defeat, when he tells that he had found one man in a thousand, and not even that percen­ tage in the case of woman, meaning of course the normal article. The fact is, that when we find, or think we find, a perfectly normal individual, the fault­ less, it is likely to turn out to be the illusion of smallness mistaken for per­ fection. In other words, the perfect man is a dwarf, in whom the whole structure is so diminutive that it will take a strong microscope to discover any 5 detail smaller than the rest. Enlarged to the normal size, the perfect dwarf will come out a cripple like the rest of us. II. HLU TSacfegrounö Rule of Reason in Literature HIS insufficiency of man to see truth in its perspective and to realize his own total­ ity is most interestingly illustrated, at the opening of the nineteenth century, in the great spiritual and verbal war which then took place and divided all Europe into two camps. What made this war the more bitter, was the fact that it was a struggle for supremacy not between forces which, in the nature of their existence, really are two and dual, but between forces which really are the two halves of one whole. Nothing exceeds in bitterness war between brothers. Near relatives at war seldom see the expedient so near at hand to strangers, who may easily agree to disagree. No hate is more deadly than the hate which 7 is, at bottom, love. As in the war just referred to, in which we find arrayed against each other not only brothers of the same family, poets of the same school, interests of the same society, but faculty against faculty within the one mind. Perhaps the war was at bottom a racial struggle, the old fight for su­ premacy between the Roman and the Teuton, not however any longer the Roman and the Teuton of two different civilizations, or rather culture versus barbarism, but the Roman and the Teuton for centuries amalgamated into one culture, one religion, almost one nation, now suddenly springing apart, the next moment to rush at each other's throat. What provocation from without, what impulse from within could be so power­ ful as to cause this estrangement, this sudden falling out of elements, so long and so thoroughly mixed as really to seem one and the same ? To understand this and know this whole struggle more intimately it is necessary to see the new romantic movement in its immediate reaction against the school of reason, 8 which preceded it and, in a negative sort of way, called it into being. The school of reason was born with the Renaissance and nourished on the then newly discovered literature of the classics. It waxed fat from the luxu­ riant pasture of classical forms, and grew strong and independent with the spirit of an ancient world culture. Having given its aid and succor to that partial renunciation of traditions which we call the Reformation, for its own part it threw off the yoke of all traditions once and for all, enthroning Reason, where Religion, now called Superstition, had ruled supreme. Rightly so perhaps, as far as the choice of ruler is concerned. Presupposing that a vacancy really existed in the of­ fice of Supreme Authority; presuppos­ ing the merited downfall of tradition, all tradition, revelation included; pre­ supposing that man was to find his sov­ ereign within himself and nowhere else, the choice could not have fallen on a worthier candidate. In the whole king­ dom of mind reason alone has any chance as a ruler. Emotion has no com­ petent claim. Emotion cannot rule for 9 one day without turning the whole gov­ ernment into anarchy, stopping the whole machinery, as it were, by an over­ charge of energy. Imagination does even worse than that, running the ma­ chinery to its certain destruction against all speed limits. Emotion is the cen­ tripetal force of mind. Unconstrained it ends in a heap. Imagination is mind's centrifugal force. Unconstrained it leads in's Blaue hinein. Reason alone has any chance of authority to centralize and unify. And for a while reason behaved fine. Mankind progressed by leaps and bounds. Old philosophemes were popularized in­ to their elements of every day maxims. Intellectualism made every riddle trans­ parent. God and nature were reduced to science. Everything was generalized, systematized, humanized. Old, foggy no­ tions were distilled into their pure es­ sence ; mists cleared into daylight; the emotional elements of thought, so hard to get rid of, successfully clarified in the perfectly dry heat of reason; in brief, ideals on every hand reduced to ideas. The particular was spread out into 10 the universal. There were no longer nations and individuals, there was hu­ manity. There were no longer creeds, per­ suasions, conscience, there were laws, eternal, unchangeable laws of nature and laws of mind. Truth for once stood revealed to the senses in such an aboslute power as to make unbelief quite impos­ sible and belief quite unnecessary. Noth­ ing went slip-shod in this great machin­ ery. Everything came out as expected. Nothing was too hidden to be exam­ ined, nothing too sacred to be under­ stood. Religion was reduced to a sys­ tem of moral philosophy, practical hy­ gienics, and, for funeral necessities, a tear. Preachers left their Bibles at home, brought herbariums with them into the pulpit, taught their listeners the rel­ ative value of different fertilizers and advised against placing graveyards too near the city, when they did not lecture on the apparent ignorance of the apos­ tles and the stupidity of the prophets. Poetry was no longer a life calling but became the pastime of leisure moments, devoted to that near approach to an ideal known as utile chad. Picturing nature was legalized into a science of 11 colors and situations: the sky always blue, like in Italy, the grass ever green, and all the people shepherds and shep­ herdesses, dressed according to the latest fashion, moving about in this correct nature, whiling away their time a la Boccaccio, who now is worshipped as the first modern man. Everything in the province of human experience was worked out according to a model. Noth­ ing escaped the levelling ironroller of system and order. There was truly so much that was beautiful or at least sounded beautiful in all this.Downtrodden humanity was res­ cued, if only in print. None was bigger than the rest, at least in theory. The worst despot upon the throne was pleased to call himself the first citizen of a free republic, carefully reserving to himself all the executive powers of liberty.