or rather agility, is his highest perfection. The more numerous his emotions, the nobler the man. The fickler the man, the more numerous his emotions. This conscious union of nobility and fickleness is the romantic irony, which consists in receiving each new enthusiasm with a merry pride. ’Twas not the first, and will not be the last. We see through it, even while we submit to it. We are more than it is, and will survive it. Long live King Experience, who showers upon us new feelings!
So much for an ingenious and thoroughly detestable view of life, in which there is for an earnest man no rest. This irony, what is it but the laughter of demons over the miserable weakness of human character? The emotion was to be our god. It turns out to be a wretched fetich, and we know it as such. ’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands. It is gone, though we trusted in it. It was our stay, and it has flowed away like water. This is not fullness, but hollowness, of life. And how shall the romantic irony supply the vacancy? This irony is but the word of Mephistopheles about the ruin of Gretchen: Sie ist die erste nicht. Not the first change of emotion is this present one; not the first breaking up of the fountains of the great deep within us; but what misery in that thought! Then there is nothing sure, nothing significant. In our own hearts were we to find life, and there is no true life there; only masks with nothing beneath them; only endless and meaningless change.
The consciousness of this result is present in another form of the romantic spirit. The consequence
