France, and had greatly influenced certain minds in Germany. Shelley and
Keats were saying something of the sort in England. Even as to
Wordsworth, it may be an open question if his religion was not mainly
romanticism. All these men used language which had been conventionally
associated with religion, to describe this other emotion.

Rationalism had ended in proving deadly to ideals. This was true. But
men forgot for the moment how glorious an ideal it had once been to be
rational and to assert the rationality of the universe. Still the time
had come when, in Germany at all events, the great cry was, 'back to the
ideal.' It is curious that men always cry 'back' when they mean
'forward.' For it was not the old idealism, either religious or
æsthetic, which they were seeking. It was a new one in which the sober
fruits of rationalism should find place. Still, for the moment, as we
have seen, the air was full of the cry, 'back to the State by divine
right, back to the Church, back to the Middle Age, back to the beauty of
classical antiquity.' The poetry, the romance, the artistic criticism of
this movement set themselves free at a stroke from theological bondage
and from the externality of conventional ethics. It shook off the dust
of the doctrinaires. It ridiculed the petty utilitarianism which had
been the vogue. It had such an horizon as men had never dreamed before.
It owed that horizon to the rationalism it despised. From its new
elevation it surveyed all the great elements of the life of man. It saw
morals and religion, language and society, along with art and itself, as
the free and unconscious product through the ages, of the vitality of
the human spirit. It must be said that it neither solved nor put away
the ancient questions. Especially through its one-sided æstheticism it
veiled that element of dualism in the world which Kant clearly saw, and
we now see again, after a century which has sometimes leaned to easy
pantheism. However, it led to a study of the human soul and of all its