In the extreme type of romantic ironist not only are intellect and emotion at loggerheads but action often belies both: he thinks one thing and feels another and does still a third. The most ironical contrast of all is that between the romantic “ideal” and the actual event. The whole of romantic morality is from this point of view, as I have tried to show, a monstrous series of ironies. The pacifist, for example, has been disillusioned so often that he should by this time be able to qualify as a romantic ironist, to look, that is, with a certain aloofness on his own dream. The crumbling of the ideal is often so complete indeed when put to the test that irony is at times, we may suppose, a merciful alternative to madness. When disillusion overtakes the uncritical enthusiast, when he finds that he has taken some cloud bank for terra firma, he continues to cling to his dream, but at the same time wishes to show that he is no longer the dupe of it; and so “hot baths of sentiment,” as Jean Paul says of his novels, “are followed by cold douches of irony.” The true German master of the genre is, however, Heine. Every one knows with what coldness his head came to survey the enthusiasms of his heart, whether in love or politics. One may again measure the havoc that life had wrought with Renan’s ideals if one compares the tone of his youthful “Future of Science” with the irony of his later writings. He compliments Jesus by ascribing to him an ironical detachment similar to his own. Jesus, he says, has that mark of the superior nature--the power to rise above his own dream and to smile down upon it. Anatole France, who is even more completely detached from his own dreams than his master Renan, sums up the romantic emancipation of imagination and sensibility from any definite centre when he says that life should have as its supreme witnesses irony and pity.