The sun. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1916-1920, 1919-07-20

N bOO1 lne -iln century d. I. the
L 4 Yellow Emperor, Hoang-ti, took
the royal saddle in China. He Immediately
began the manufacture and enforcement
of common sense His subjects. previous
to that time, had been perfectly human.
In Chinese history the time previous to
the ascension of the Yellow Emperor is
known as the Age of the Primitives- Men
did as they wisht, and crime and duty
and prohibition were unknown concepts.
But the Yellow Emperor, according to
old chronicles, was bourgeois He be-
lieved in work, discipline, prayer, Sunday
closing and UpEft. This is the Chinese
Fall Of Man. Original Sin was TO be
happy and free. Along came the Yellow
Emperor and tempted his subjects with
the brown bread of the regular eurfew
life. sinee then China has been working
for everybody else.
Confucius- Benjamin Franklin of
his time-made his appearance and got
up an old farmers almanac of aphOrisms
which bolstered up the new regime In the
Chinaman's psyche. He was as unimag-
NATIVE as Congressman and as practical
as a door1nat. But you can't kill the
Greenwich Village Instinct in the human
heart. The Romantic Spirit is as i'm
mortal as lying. The Chinese poets Of
the doormat, fig leaf, Thursday prayer
meeting age got busy. They dreamed
back to the Eden Of Vagabondia, when
individuality in life and artistic express
sion were the ideals, to the time when the
earth was a Hyde Park and every man,
woman and child was born with soap
box to air his ego.
Comes Taoism on the scene and forms
a personal liberty league against the
Kaisers of skin tight life and their court
Topper, Confucius. Chuang-tzu was their
Swinburne, their Baudelaire, their Casa
nova and their Poe all rolled into one.
He proclaimed the greatness of Bohemia,
he ridiculed Mrs. Grundy, SHE'D epigrams
at the sobersides, emplaced Aphrodite
upon the sacred tomb Of Chi-lu, god Of
Don'ts, and even ventured the blasphemy
that Nature was wiser than Reason. He
left few sayings, the most famous Of
which is: "One satyr is worth royal
flush" The solid ivory descendants Of
the Yellow Emperor had him mewed in
dungeons forevermore.
Chunag-tzu and his followers were TIE
first of the modern Romantics about
which Irving Rabbit, professor of
French literature in Harvard. has writ
ten a book, Rousseau and Romanticism.
1t is a complete thesaurus, in 1893 pages
and SOL references, of the imaginative
rascals Of poetry, prose and music. The
books that are named in the references
constitute a library of the lore of the
imagination. He who sits may read, and
Prof. Babbitt has evidently been reading
the literature of Romanticism since he sat
in the cradle From Cain to Kenyon Cox
they are all there. The book is an in
dietment of the extravagant imagination
and plea for common sense. Of course
the "New Humanism" is there-which is
highbrow for socialism, pacifsm and the
abolition of the Family Entrance"
Rousseau, as Prof. Rabbit says, is
taken as the supreme type Of the modern
Romantic movement because the French
man registered the reaction against class
ieism. Rousseau was an embodiment, a
protagonist. He was the great individual
list, the superb egoist, the defiant chron-
icler of himself. He puts bombs under
the thrones of the yellow emperors of The
conventions. Before Old Walt he pro-
claimed himself. He said: 81 am a Per-
sonality, not a member of society; 1 am
a Being, not an automaton; am a de-
struetive, dynamic, multivisioned and
multipointed Force, not copy book"
His theories of nature and his edupa-