y present and the anxious future,
the romantic takes refuge with the dear good dead people, and spins
out further what it has learned from them. But every big man was a
shaper of his own time, a respecter of antiquity and conscious of his
inheritance as a grown and capable man may be; not a youth in
sheltered tutelage, but a master of the living world, and a herald of
the future. "Modernity" is foolish, but antiquarianism is rubbish;
life in its vigour is neither new nor antique, but young.

True it is indeed that we love the old, many-coloured, concrete,
pre-mechanistic world; we cannot take an antique thing in our hands or
read an antique word without feeling its enchantment. It is a joy to
the heart, and one prohibited to no man, to dream at times romantic
dreams, to live in the past, and to forget, as we do it, that this
very dreaming, this very life, owes its charm to the fact that we
are of another age. It is a magic like that of childhood--but to want
to go back to it is not only childish, but a deliberate fraud and
self-deception. We should realize, as I have shown years ago, that the
difference of our age from that age is the ever-present fact of the
density of our population. Any one who wants to go back, really wants
that forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is
ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to
say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to
the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our
forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people
like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a
house embowered in vines--there will be room enough for that!--Ah, you
thinkers and brooders, what would you say if men answered you: No! Go
yourself and spin in a factory, for you have shown clearly enough that
your thinking and brooding are futile. All your fine phrases amount to
nothing but the one dread monosyllable--Die! Are you so wicked as
that, and know it? or so stupid, and know it not?

Thought is the most responsible of all functions. He who thinks for
others must look after them, and if they live he may not slay them. It
is therefore a mischievous piece of romantic folly to point us to the
past. We must all pass through the dark gateway, and the sage has no
right to growl: Leave me out--I am the salt of the earth! The first
thing we have to do is to save humanity; not a selecte