tic soul are appropriately mirrored in the changes of the seasons. In Tieck's "Genoveva," for example, Golo's love blossoms in the springtime, the sultry summer impels him to sinful passion, the autumn brings grief and repentance, and in winter avenging judgment overtakes the offender and casts him into the grave. Autumn is perhaps even more than springtime the favorite season of the Rousseauist. The movement is filled with souls who like the hero of Poe's "Ulalume" have reached the October of their sensations. Some traces of this sympathetic relation between man and nature may indeed be found in the literature of the past. The appropriateness of the setting in the "Prometheus Bound" of Eschylus would scarcely seem to be an accident. The storm in "Lear" may also be instanced. But as I have already said occidental man did not before Rousseau show much inclination to mingle with the landscape. The parallelism that Pater establishes in "Marius the Epicurean" between the moods of the hero and the shifting aspects of nature is felt as a distinct anachronism. If we wish to find any early approximations to the subtleties and refinements of the Rousseauist in his dealings with nature we need to turn to the Far East - especially to the Taoist movement in China. As a result of the Taoist influence China had Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Cf. Lamartine: Quand la feuille des bois tombe dans la prairie, L'Isolement. 1 Cf. Hettner, Romantische Schule, 156. ? See appendix on Chinese primitivism. from a very early period poets and painters for whom the landscape is very plainly a state of the soul. Pantheistic revery of the kind I have been describing leads inevitably to a special type of symbolism. The Rousseauist reads into nature unutterable love. He sees shining through its finite forms the light of the infinite. The Germans especially set out to express symbolically the relationship between the love and infinitude that they saw in nature and the kindred elements in themselves. Any one who has attempted to thread his way through the German theories of the symbol will feel that he has, like Wordsworth's shepherd, "been in the heart of many thousand mists." But in view of the importance of the subject it is necessary to venture for a moment into this metaphysical murk. Schelling's "Nature Philosophy" is perhaps the most ambitious of all the German attempts to run together symbolically the human spirit and phenomenal nature. "What we call nature," says Schelling, "is a poem that lies hidden in a secret wondrous writing"; if the riddle could be revealed we should recognize in nature "the Odyssey of the Spirit." "There looks out through sensuous objects as through a half-transparent mist the world of phantasy for which we long." "All things are only a garment of the world of spirit." "To be romantic," says Uhland, "is to have an inkling of the infinite in appearances." "Beauty," says Schelling in similar vein, "is a finite rendering of the infinite." Now the infinite and the finite can only be thus brought together through the medium of the symbol. Therefore, as A. W. Schlegel says, "beauty is a symbolical representation of the infinite. All poetry is an everlasting symbolizing." This assertion is in an important sense true. Unfortunately there remains the ambiguity that I have already pointed out in the word "infinite." No one would give a high rating to a certain type of allegory that flourished in neo-classical times as also in a somewhat different form during the Middle Ages. It is a cold intellectual contrivance in which the imagination has little part and which therefore fails to suggest the infinite in any sense. But to universalize the particular in the classical sense is to give access imaginatively to the human infinite that is set above nature. Every successful humanistic creation is more or less symbolical. Othello is not merely a jealous man; he is also a symbol of jealousy. Some of the myths of Plato again are imaginative renderings of a supersensuous realm to which man has no direct access. They are symbolical representations of an infinite that the romanticist leaves out of his reckoning. The humanistic and spiritual symbols that abound in the religion and poetry of the past, are then, it would seem, very different from the merely æsthetic symbolizing of a Schelling. For Schelling is one of the chief of those who from Shaftesbury down have tended to identify beauty and truth and to make both purely æsthetic. But a symbol that is purely aesthetic, that is in other words purely a matter of feeling, rests on what is constantly changing not only from man to man but in the same man. Romantic symbolism, therefore, though it claims at one moment to be scientific (especially in Germany) and at another moment to have a religious value, is at bottom the symbolizing of mood. Both the imagination and the emotion that enter into the romantic symbol are undisciplined. The results of such a symbolism do not meet the demand of the genuine man of science for experimental proof, they do not again satisfy the test of universality imposed by those who believe in a distinctively human realm that is set above nature. The nature philosophy of a Schelling leads therefore on the one hand to sham science and on the other to sham philosophy and religion. The genuine man of science has as a matter of fact repudiated the speculations of Schelling and other romantic physicists as fantastic. He may also be counted on to look with suspicion on the speculations of a Bergson who, more perhaps than any living Rousseauist, reminds one of the German romantic philosophers. One idea has however lingered in the mind even of the genuine man of science as a result of all this romantic theorizing-namely that man has access to the infinite only through nature. Thus Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn said in a recent address to the students of Columbia University: I would not for a moment take advantage of the present opportunity to discourage the study of human nature and of the humanities, but for what is called the best opening for a constructive career give me nature. The ground for my preference is that human nature is an exhaustible fountain of research; Homer understood it well; Solomon fathomed it; Shakespeare divined it, both normal and abnormal; the modernists have been squeezing out the last drops of abnormality. Nature, studied since Aristotle's time, is still full to the brim; no perceptible falling of its tides is evident from any point at which it is attacked, from nebula to protoplasm; it is always wholesome, refreshing and invigorating. Of the two most creative literary artists of our time, Maeterlinck, jaded with human abnormality, comes back to the bee and the flowers and the "blue bird," with a delicious renewal of youth, while Rostand turns to the barnyard. The romanticists acted from the start, following here in the wake of the pseudo-classicists, on Professor Os born's assumption that normal human nature is something that may be bottled up once for all and put by on a shelf, though they would have been pained to learn from him that even abnormal human nature may also be bottled up and put by in the same fashion. Sophistries of this kind should perhaps be pardoned in the man of science when so many men who are supposed to stand for letters have shown him the way. Great literature is an imaginative and symbolical interpretation of an infinite that is accessible only to those who possess in some degree the same type of imagination. A writer like Maeterlinck, whom Professor Osborn takes to be representative of literature in general, is merely a late exponent of a movement that from the start turned away from this human infinite towards pantheistic revery. The imagination is, as Coleridge says, the great unifying power; it draws together things that are apparently remote. But its analogies to be of value should surely have validity apart from the mere shifting mood of the man who perceives them. Otherwise he simply wrests some outer object from the chain of cause and effect of which it is actually a part, and incorporates it arbitrarily into his own private dream. Wordsworth is not sparing of homely detail in his account of his leech-gatherer; but at a given moment in this poem the leech-gatherer undergoes a strange transformation; he loses all verisimilitude as a leech-gatherer and becomes a romantic symbol, a mere projection, that is, of the poet's own broodings. To push this symbolizing of mood beyond a certain point is incipient hallucination. We are told that when the asylum at Charenton was shelled in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the lunatics saw reflected in the bursting |