he is a law unto
himself, that he may erect his person into a sovereign over the whole
universe. He perversely identifies discipline with repression and
makes the unlimited the goal both of imagination and conduct. Oscar
Wilde's epigrams, and more particularly his fables, are examples of
a thoroughgoing naturalist's insolent indifference to any form of
restraint. All things, whether holy or bestial, were material for his
topsy-turvy wit, his literally unbridled imagination. No humanistic
law of decency, that is to say, a proper respect for the opinions of
mankind, and no divine law of reverence and humility, acted for him
as a restraining force or a selective principle. An immediate and
significant example of this naturalistic riot of feeling, with its
consequent false and anarchic scale of values, is found in the
film dramas of the moving picture houses. Unreal extravagance of
imagination, accompanied by the debauch of the aesthetic and moral
judgment, frequently distinguishes them. In screenland, it is the
vampire, the villain, the superman, the saccharine angel child,
who reign almost undisputed. Noble convicts, virtuous courtesans,
attractive murderers, good bad men, and ridiculous good men, flit
across the canvas haloed with cheap sentimentality. Opposed to them,
in an ever losing struggle, are those conventional figures who stand
for the sober realities of an orderly and disciplined world; the
judge, the policeman, the mere husband. These pitiable and laughable
figures are always outwitted; they receive the fate which indeed, in
any primitive society, they so richly deserve!

How deeply sunk in the modern world are the roots of this naturalism
is shown by its long course in history, paralleling humanism. It has
seeped down through the Protestant centuries in two streams. One is
a sort of scientific naturalism. It exalts material phenomena and the
external order, issues in a glorification of elemental impulses, an
attempted return to childlike spontaneous living, the identifying of
man's values with those of primitive nature. The other is an emotional
naturalism, of which Maeterlinck is at the moment a brilliant and
lamentable example. This exchanges the world of sober conduct,
intelligible and straightforward thinking for an unfettered dreamland,
compounded of fairy beauty, flashes of mystical and intuitive
understanding intermixed with claptrap magic, a high-flown
commercialism and an etherealized sensuality.