men, render to one another, of the impossibility of transmuting into
the pure gold of romance the emotions originating in the stock market,
in race-hatred, and in national vainglory.

We have lingered too long, perhaps, over these various evidences of the
romantic temper of America. We must now glance at the forces of
reaction, the recoil to fact. What is it which contradicts, inhibits,
or negatives the romantic tendency? Among other forces, there is
certainly humor. Humor and romance often go hand in hand, but humor is
commonly fatal to romanticism. There is satire, which rebukes both
romanticism and romance, which exposes the fallacies of the one, and
punctures the exuberance of the other. More effective, perhaps, than
either humor or satire as an antiseptic against romance, is the
overmastering sense of fact. This is what Emerson called the instinct
for the milk in the pan, an instinct which Emerson himself possessed
extraordinarily on his purely Yankee side, and which a pioneer country
is forced continually to develop and to recognize. Camping, for
instance, develops both the romantic sense and the fact sense. Supper
must be cooked, even at Walden Pond. There must be hewers of wood and
drawers of water, and the dishes ought to be washed.

On a higher plane, also, than this mere sense of physical necessity,
there are forces limiting the influence of romance. Schiller put it all
into one famous line:--

"Und was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine."

Or listen to Keats:--

"'T is best to remain aloof from people, and like their good
parts, without being eternally troubled with the dull process
of their everyday lives.... All I can say is that standing at
Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North and South, I can
see nothing but dullness."

And Henry James, describing New York in his book, _The American Scene_,
speaks of "the overwhelming preponderance of the unmitigated
'business-man' face ... the consummate monotonous commonness of the
pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass--with the confusion
carried to chaos for any intelligence, any perception; a welter of
objects and sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, meaning,
perished utterly and lost all rights ... the universal _will to
move_--to move, move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at any
price."

One need not be a poet like Keats or an inveterate psychologist like
Henry James, in order to become aware how the commo