ts
ultimately triumph? He would be a hardy prophet who should venture to
assert it. We must reckon always with the swing of the human pendulum,
with the reaction against reaction. Here, for example, during the last
decade, has been book after book written about the reaction against
democracy. All over the world, it is asserted, there are unmistakable
signs that democracy will not practically work in the face of the
modern tasks to which the world has set itself. One reads these books,
one persuades himself that the hour for democracy is passing, and then
one goes out on the street and buys a morning newspaper and discovers
that democracy has scored again. So is it with the experience of the
individual. You may fancy that the romance of the seas passes, for you,
with the passing of the square-sailed ship. If Mr. Kipling's poetry
cannot rouse you from that mood of reaction, walk down to the end of
the pier to-morrow and watch the ocean liner come up the harbor. If
there is no romance there, you do not know romance when you see it!

Take the case of the farmer; his prosaic life is the butt of the
newspaper paragraphers from one end of the country to the other. But
does romance disappear from the farm with machinery and scientific
agriculture? There are farmers who follow Luther Burbank's experiments
with plants, with all the fascination which used to attach to alchemy
and astrology. The farmer has no longer Indians to fight or a
wilderness to subdue, but the soils of his farm are analyzed at his
state university by men who live in the daily atmosphere of the romance
of science, and who say, as a professor in the University of Chicago
said once, that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knew what was
going on within its cell-structure, you would be afraid to stay alone
with it in the dark."

The reaction from romance, therefore, real as it is, and dead weight as
it lies upon the soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces which
destroy it. In other words, the reaction against one type of romance
produces inevitably another type of romance, other aspects of wonder,
terror, and beauty. Following the romance of adventure comes, after
never so deep a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like the
crest of another wave; and then comes what we call, for lack of a
better word, the psychological romance, the old mystery and strangeness
of the human soul, AEschylus and Job, as Victor Hugo says, in the poor
crawfish gath