Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/28

Rh selves that, in quite a literal sense of the colloquial phrase, they "have no use" for the world; a discovery which would still be true were it stated obversely. The romantic world-view, thus fundamentally oriented by world-contempt, entails, at least in theory, the repudiation of all earthly joys — notably the joy of working — and the renouncement of all worldly ambition; it scorns the cooperative, social disposition, invites the soul to a progressive withdrawal into the inner ego, and ends in complete surrender to one sole aspiration: the search of the higher vision, the vision, that is, of things beyond their tangible reality. To such mystical constructions of the inner eye a certain group of German writers who flourished in the beginning of the nineteenth century and were known as the Romantics, darkly groped their way out of the confining realities of their own time. The most modern spell of romanticism, the one through which our own generation was but yesterday passing, measures its difference from any previous romantic era by the difference between earlier states of culture and our own. Life with us is conspicuously more assertive and aggressive in its social than in its individual expressions, which was by no means always so, and unless the