values but of Arcadian
fancy. The pre-Raphaelites belong here, together with a group of young
Englishmen who flourished between 1890 and 1914, of whom John Davidson
and Richard Middleton, both suicides, are striking examples. Poor
Middleton turned from naturalism to religion at the last. When he had
resolved on death, he wrote a message telling what he was about to do,
parting from his friend with brave assumption of serenity. But he did
not send the postcard, and in the last hour of that hired bedroom in
Brussels, with the bottle of chloroform before him, he traced across
the card's surface "a broken and a contrite spirit thou wilt not
despise." So there was humility at the last. One remembers rather
grimly what the clown says in _Twelfth Night_,

"Pleasure will be paid some time or other."

This same revolt against the decencies and conventions of our humanist
civilization occupies a great part of present literature. How far
removed from the clean and virile stoicism of George Meredith or the
honest pessimism of Thomas Hardy is Arnold Bennett's _The Pretty Lady_
or Galsworthy's _The Dark Flower_. Finally, in this country we need
only mention, if we may descend so far, such naturalists in literature
as Jack London, Robert Chambers and Gouverneur Morris. One's only
excuse for referring to them is that they are vastly popular with the
people whom you and I try to interest in sermons, to whom we talk on
religion!

Of course, this naturalism in letters has its accompanying and
interdependent philosophic theory, its intellectual interpretation
and defense. As Kant is the noblest of the moralists, so I suppose
William James and, still later, Henri Bergson and Croce are the chief
protagonists of unrestrained feeling and naturalistic values in the
world of thought. To the neo-realists "the thing given" is alone
reality. James' pragmatism frankly relinquishes any absolute standard
in favor of relativity. In _the Varieties of Religious Experience_,
which Professor Babbitt tells us someone in Cambridge suggested should
have had for a subtitle "Wild Religions I Have Known," he is plainly
more interested in the intensity than in the normality, in the
excesses than in the essence of the religious life. Indeed, Professor
Babbitt quotes him as saying in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton,
"mere sanity is the most Philistine and at the bottom most unessential
of a man's attributes."[15] In the same way Bergson, consistently
anti-So