THE NEW ROMANCE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1126, 13 May 1911, Page 9

THE NEW ROMANCE.

Heine, meeting in Ferdinand Lassallo the advance guard of "thrones, dominations, princedoms, powers," newly arrayed against his spirit, thought Romance —the romance ot which, as he eaid, he himself was "the last fairyking"—must perforce be overcome. His kingdom was doomed; its "thousand years' reign" was over; thenceforward the world must do as best it might with the clutch of grim fact at its tsroat and a chill as of death within its heart. Fancy would become a play for children, not for grown men; and the artistic imagination would bo disinherited of the truth it bad allied with beauty, and in- which, its highest inspiration had been found. An intelligence that could pull the. world and man to bits would arrange all things in a pattern of its own. The- years that havo gone by since. Heine died havo abundantly fulfilled his prophecy and justified his fears'. They have been lean and evil years for the artist, barren, years for all romance that could not stand against a blast of critical analysis which swept its field, and carried off, with the "wood, hay, stubble" of fancy held /or fact, the truth on which it fed. Our fairy-kings have been dethroned; ind art, so far as it is concerned with \he story of humanity, has lived on reminiscences, echoes, reverberations of the past. Little enough inspiration has come to jt from the present; from.the artist's survey of the- life of man, his whence and what and whither; from loligion; from the greater wisdom som« men have.worshipped through long clays Df dryness, when no man of the- new knowledge- Heino feai'ed could call bis soul his own. Most thinking men in the era of the last enlightenment, were content or thought they were content, to work and creep in tho dust which seemed their proper place. An ignominious content was, for the 'most part, thrust upon them. The only power that- could then resist tho mighty army of dead iacts was not a power tf " reflective thought, nor of imagination; it was the power they had lost in a confusion coming in with the new order —the power of faith in their own life, in their own experience, ii) their vision of a deeper truth. The swoop of analysis, which had ranged the detail of their bodies and their brains as scientific facts, had driven life itself away, cast their experience in their tsetli and darkened vision. Consciousness—that by which all facts aro made—this consciousness, they wore assured, was ,of no more importance to tho midline that is a mere by-product ground it out, ihan tho whistle to the railway engine jr the flying shadow to a cloud driven by tho wind. What was there left for any man who was n man, except to bo content? Why struggle vainly in tho prip of a fate more blind and inexorable than' that which held tho gods of Greece? So we grinned and horn our fata. And romance, as we had known it, died. Only sentiment remained; and sentimentality—defying not only , fate and fp.rt, but art and truth —a mawkish thing which in its elusive incoherence keeps up still a meaningless resistance to the reason of tho world. Man. however, neither died 7ior changed. His divine discontent, too, nvprcainn his false- and ininntiml content. Therefor'.', wo nf this ponerntion

are oiakins a discovery that Heine

would have hailed. We aro discovering ourselves, and in ourselves tho field of a romance that never dies but is ever being transformed. So wo find romanco once more, tho "true romanco" that Kipling sings, the romance of tho immortal child in man. "Who holds by Thee hath Heaven in fee To giM his dross thereby, And knowledge, sure that he cntluro A child until he die—" This new-born romanco belongs to the prophet and tho seer of reality, to the artist for whom in all ages truth and beauty are inseparably one, and tn the eternal spirit and temper of the child. Who would have thought that its first legitimate lords wcro to bo philosophers and men of science Who would have thought that a hair of the dog that bit us was to heal our wound? Yet wo might well havo thought it, for there is no cure for the hurt given by a knowledg3 pmo thus far except a knowledge farther still. Wo may evade tho hurt, for a time, or generation, and if evasion suits us; but never shall vo cure it in any other way. And if thero were no cure by a deeper knowledge, for the dicadnil wound of tho spirit and heart of man given in the past years of our government by "impersonal and aimless laws," tho throne, of romance would be worse than empty since its last king died—it would bo abandoned by a world stricken too sorely to care to sec it filled. "Non, non, Monsieur Kenan n'a pas le droit d'etre gai." That is tho point. We must havo tho right to our romancs, the right to freedom, to a trust in thts vision of tho inner eye, to hops and faith and selfbestowing love, to a sacrifice of ourselves beToro a far-off ideal of ourselves. Wβ must bo able to hold up our heads in face of any challenge; and to return a challengo bolder still, because more secure and better warranted. Wo must meet the demand i of thu analytic reason with tho justified, as well as just, claims of tho whole of reason and of tlio life of man. So we shall bring in our new romance, with new liberty of soul and a kingdom of high and infinite adventure. In tho wildest or tho fairest dreams of a fancy or an imagination playing over the unordered world there is no such field of ■ adventure, no such summons to. courngo to devotion, admiration, as opens up before a man who confidently knows that ho is free, and able to receive into his own life power and. moro life from an inexhaustible sourco given him to use. There is ;. where any romanco equal to the romance of reality,; when we acknowledge life to be creative in itself and of itself, not captive to. any end, still less degree, not mastered by tho. determinism of things, nor timed by their inflexible succession. A life not calculable even by omniscience, yet controlled by each man who lives, and to. be more and more controlled as he leanis mastery and chooses to be free, a life of the god a man may be—this marvel is ours by right of tho new knowledge of our day, now-swiftly overtaking that other which sn'oto' us with tho sword of our most stern enlightenment. ' The mechanical interpretation of the glorios and wonders of our promise and our potent lifo has no terrors left for tJioso among us who have come to understand it, and put it in its right place. Wo knew it foi what it is, a useful tool. We throw, it down when we havo done with it; and turn to living and its x serious affairs--to art. to beauty, faith, tho problems of a boundless love and boundless need in a world where every man is keeper of all other men, and no man lives by bread alone. Wo shall never return to tho chaos of fact that wo have left behind. Wo shall never again suffc-r as wo did from our unordered knowledge, and from /in undistinguished ignorance corrodrhg tlio very heart of things, giving place to superstitions matching..with itself, and holding fast, in the threes of its own weakness, otlr most- vitil truth. New orders there will be, assuredly; but it is not too much to say that the perils of any new order arc as nothing, will always be as nothing, to tho perils of tho utter want of order that had to bo swept away when order came. We shall never return to the old romance, al though its fairy-kings still have their place and our allegiance. We I'svo a new romance, and are waiting for new kings. Tho throne is empty and iuviting. But tJio artists are not ready. Tho spirit of tho recent past still keeps its cold- hand upon their hearts, and their blood moves slowly in their veins. Or they seek inspiration in tlio remoter past, and make pretence do for a faith that they have lost, take reproduction for the. living reality that should move them to create. It is all too new, this spirit now invading us; and its manifestation is as yet too remote, perhaps, from the life of dreamers, poets, painters, and the rest. But the other men, tho men of science and philosophy, aro aroused, and who shall say how short tho time may be before this heavenly fire spreads? From Aiistotlo to Aquinas was long indeed; from Aquinas to Dante, from Dante to the whole world, how short! Is it true —think you— that .religion is to he ciico more the herald of romance, to mediate between philosophy and art, and stir our kings to fill that empty throne? If it is, we shall not liavo long to wait, for things move quickly nowadays, and the modern Aquinas is already at work—in many places and under many names.—"Tho Ttfci+.inil "