 of caravans, or of tigers, or of
historical characters, or of ghosts, or of forgers, or of detectives, or of
beautiful wicked women, or of pistols and knives, but they appear for the most
part reducible to the idea of the facing of danger, the acceptance of great
risks for the fascination, the very love, of their uncertainty, the joy of
success if possible and of battle in any case. This would be a fine formula if
it bore examination; but it strikes me as weak and inadequate, as by no means
covering the true ground and yet as landing us in strange confusions.
    The panting pursuit of danger is the pursuit of life itself, in which danger
awaits us possibly at every step and faces us at every turn; so that the dream
of an intenser experience easily becomes rather some vision of a sublime
security like that enjoyed on the flowery plains of heaven, where we may
conceive ourselves proceeding in ecstasy from one prodigious phase and form of
it to another. And if it be insisted that the measure of the type is then in the
appreciation of danger - the sign of our projection of the real being the
smallness of its dangers, and that of our projection of the romantic the
hugeness, the mark of the distinction being in short, as they say of collars and
gloves and shoes, the size and number of the danger - this discrimination again
surely fails, since it makes our difference not a difference of kind, which is
what we want, but a difference only of degree, and subject by that condition to
the indignity of a sliding scale and a shifting measure. There are immense and
flagrant dangers that are but sordid and squalid ones, as we feel, tainting with
their quality the very defiances they provoke; while there are common and covert
ones, that look like nothing and that can be but inwardly and occultly dealt
with, which involve the sharpest hazards to life and honour and the highest
instant decisions and intrepidities of action. It is an arbitrary stamp that
keeps these latter prosaic and makes the former heroic; and yet I should still
less subscribe to a mere subjective division - I mean one that would place the
difference wholly in the temper of the imperilled agent. It would be impossible
to have a more romantic temper than Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and yet nothing
less resembles a romance than the record of her adventures. To classify it by
that aspect - the definition of the spirit that happens to animate her - is like
settling the question (as I have seen it witlessly settled) by the presence or
absence of costume.
