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PREFACE. 

This Essay is published in compliance with the 
conditions under which the prize is awarded With- 
out at all wishing to deprecate criticism, I may 
plead this daim to some d^pree of indulgence^ that 
it was composed in odd hours snatched from severer 
work during the few months preceding a Tripos. 



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CONTENTS. 



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CHAPTER L 

INTRODUCTOBT. CLASSIC AND BOMANTIC IN 

GENERAL. 

§ 1» The symbolic nature of the words current 
in the complexer deportments of thought is nowhere 
better exemplified than in those which serve as the 
badges of literary movements. Literature is so inti- 
mately concerned with all the faculties of man^ that 
every literary work presents a variety of aspects which^ 
though without any essential connection^ are easily 
associated. And thus the application of terms which 
properly, it may be, denoted only one of them, 
ramifies in all directions, and their connotation 
becomes vague and indeterminate. Of this familiar 
process the terms Romantic and Classical are &mou8 
examples; the former more especially, which, from its 
original precise reference to the mediaeval epics 
written in the Romance tongue, was first transferred 
by the French novelists of the 16th and 17th 
centiuries to fictitious works in general, assumed 
thence a still more vague reference to that sort of 
charm in reality which suggests unreality : and now 

H. 1 



S XBSBRIAL CS&AiEACIXBDIICS OF THS TCH* I. 

letoina the fiintesi poflBible Hatoot of tlus sense as m 
stod: term of the guide-book and the adrertisemeiit. 
The Bomantie school of the begmning of this centuiy 
gaTO the term a more distinct reference to the past^ 
bat the implicatioii of any qwdal period became 
continually leas exdudve as their poetic culture grew. 
Alfred de Musset has amusingly illustrated^ the 
confused associations of the term^ and the perplex- 
ities of his worthy provincials have probably been 
experienced, in a degree^ by every serious critic. 

The history of the term Classic is scarcely simpler. 
From its original reference to the first class of 
Boman citizens, it was in late Latin transferred to 
those whom, by a less definite metaphor, we too 
entitie first-class writers. Deference to the literary 
authority of antiquity long made the term a synonym 
for the writers of Greece and Rome ; and this, in 
spite of the constant extension of the word to some 
whom modem criticism recognises as their equals, is 
still, when used absolutely, its commonest application* 
Let us attempt to clear this indefiniteness. 

§ 2. We will, in the first place, notice an 
especially confusing ambiguity in the usage of these 
terms, Romantic and Classia 

They denote on the one hand two types of poetic 
mind or of poetry, on the other, tw o^piovementa 
based upon the imitation or revival of these types. 
!n the same way the familiar contrast of Platonist 

^ L€ttre9 de DujpkU et CoUuuL 



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1/ 



1» 2.] BOXANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 3 

and Aristotelian may either refer to certain schools 
of mediaeval logicians or. Renaissance moralists who 
consciously derired from the Greek thinkers their 
method or their point of view ; or it may be applied, 
as by Coleridge, to express a broad distinction in the 
speculative attitude of men, of which the relation d 
Plato to Aristotle is not the source but the type. In 
^this general sense we oppose the Romantic genius of 
Shakspere to the classic genius of Sophocles : in the 
special sense the Romantic school of Hugo, of Tieck, 
of Coleridge to the classic school of Racine, Boileau 
and Pope. 

Hence Classicism and Romanticism suggest indif- 
ferently thie two sets of associatic'us t^ified byJPl^to 
and the Platonisers, by the Attic and the At%igt^by 
the antique and the antiquarian, the child and the 
lover of childhood, the naive and the sentimental, 
reality and reminiscence. Both suggest the healthy 
and vigorous emotion of youth ; both the exaggerated 
susceptibility of retrospective age. The full power of 
mature genius, which from one point of view appears 

• 

eminently classic, would be equally claimed by the 
Romantic on the strength of his divinity Shakespere; 
while the morbid extravagance of coterie sentiment— • 
the Kranke, — ^the AUerthUmdei, with which Goethe 
taunted the Romantics of his nation, are matched by 
the no less provincial limitations of the French and 
English schools of classicism. Each party, in fact; 
comprises in its own belief all that is most worthy 

1—2 



^ BSBBTTIAI. CHABACTBIRiai OF HEX [CB. L 

•and parmaiieiit in literatme; each totlie other if a 
nanow and proTincial sect, a ware wluch stined fhe 
-litemy waten for a irhfle, and then was lost ibid 
there is no donht that the battle ci the schools is 
long past; and that as conflict had brought the 
contrasted methods into sharper contrast\ so time 
blended them in a higher unity, from which, as a 
iofUer stand-point, the former combatants look back, 
and recall with a certain disgust the yain noise and 
tumult, the personal rancour, the storms in the press, 
the battles in the theatre. ''Ainsi,'* said Victor Hugo, 
''ces miserables mots» Classiciste et Bomantidste, 
aont-ils tomb& dans Tabime de 1830, comme gluckiste 
et picdniste dans le gouffre de 1789. L'art seul 
est rest^*. 

I shall not at present anticipate the question 
what is permanent, what fleeting, in their opposition. 
In any case the essence of the Eomantic must be 
studied through the eyes as it were of the Romantic 
schooL The distinction was drawn by them, applied 
by them; and neither the connotation nor the 
denotation which they gave to the term can be fully 
understood ¥rithout thoroughly entering, in the first 
place, into their point of view. 

§ 3. Perhaps all yiolent movements are partly 

^ E.g. the eoneeptioii of CUsBicigiiiM mvolTiiig tiriet obedienoe 
to oaoons was certainly intenaified hj tbe cmphatie soom of them 
oxpressed at first bj the Bomantieista. Cf. 8te. Benve ' Qii'e«l-e# 
fu*un eloMsique I' Catuerin du Lundi, iii* 

* Preface to Mariom Delorme. 



kiilta»i0immmm^tmmmmlm0fi^'**^it'tmim0'*»^m\m mUuita*tmm0m»m^mtmm>*m»m»imm^^im*if»m 



§§^ 2, 3 J ROMANTIO AND GLA9SICAL STYLES. 5 

negaUve; tbey involve^ that is, mingled with their 
definite aim and purpose, a certain element of blind 
revolt. They partly know what they seek, and 
partly know only what they shun. And whenever 
this is so, the directions which they take when 
released from all restraint and bidden to seek their 
ideals at will, are various and even discordant. 
Those whose aims are mainly negative, find satisfac- 
tion in whatever is opposed to the object of their 
antagonism; they revel in a boundless field in which 
every thing is new, and, by its mere unlikeness to 
the old, delightful. They dispby an abnormal and 
uncritical receptivity, an excessive and childish 
capacity of pleasure. Such is the case with the 
anti-classical reaction. A prosaic century had 
passed away, which, after compassing by the pens 
of encyclopaedists the destruction of loyalty, religion 
and poetry, and depreciating that mediaeval age which 
was a chief example of all of them, had finally put 
its principles into act, slain its king, made Reason 
its Qod, and, with a formal abandonment of the 
past, had inaugurated a new era. Such was the 
passionate indictment of the reactionists. But there 
were many who, however they might superficiaUy 
applaud the course implicitly enjoined in that in* 
dictment, at bottom only knew that they hated 
conventional poetry, and conventional life; and 
whatever, was rare, poetic and unconventional, 
whether in the Middle Ages or elsewhere, that they 



wmtmimmmmm 



6 BBBKmA& CBABACnEUBnCfl 09 THS [CKJU 

W8I9 ready to f^flrify And to imitotft Tho EIi«b* 
bethaa Age of England, too madi unbiied with tlie 
Benasoenoe for nalveU, too little for pedantry; .tlie 
contemponiiy drama of Spain, brilliant wi'Ji tho 
▼onatility of Lope and the caiholio chiyaliy of 
Calderon; the mediaeval epics of France and Qer- 
many, — ^Lancelot and Benard, Boland and the Nibe- 
Inngen; the stranger legend world of the Norsemen ; 
the mysterious figures of the Gadhelic legends, 
represented as was then supposed in Ossian: the 
mythology of the Ghreeks, familiar enough as a mine 
for allegory and allusion but neglected as poetry: 
the lyrics of the Jews, — ^little known, or read as 
theology rather than as literature; all these, and 
even the more remote treasures of Arabia, Persia^ 
India and China, were studied with eager and often 
uncritical enthusiasm within the first. 30 years of 
the present century. Herder, with his manifold col- 
lections of the lyrics of early literatures, had done 
in a more cosmopolitan field what Percy did for 
the ballads of Elngland. Lessing had shewed his 
countrymen the nobility of Homer and of Shakspere. 
Qoethe applied his piratic imagination to the con- 
struction of West-Oestliche Divans or caught and 
perpetuated the last breath of true chivalry in Qots 
▼on Berlichingen. Naturally influences so various^ 
whatever community of attraction underlay them, in- 
duced considerable variety of literary style. Within 
the range of lyric poetry, three distinct models 



l(MPN*«M'*"**4MHHiM«MaH«Mv«M*M«M«**«M«i*a«MMtft^^ 



§§ 3 — 5.] BOlCAlffnO AND CUkSSICAL STTLES. 7 

produced as many schools: the stern simplicity of 
the north, the melodious sweetness of the south, 
the brilliant £Btncy of the east^ each had its devotees. 
Uhland and Tieck stand apart almost as the Teuton 
from the Italian. So, the lyric measures of the 
Spanish drama were of a different genius from 
the simpler yet more digniBed iambic of the Elisa- 
bethans. 

§ 4. It would appear to be mere pedantry to 
attempt to discern among these manifold tendencies 
any one definite direction. They are united in 
divergence, but it is misplaced subtlety to unite 
them in convergence. All literatures except the 
present, all styles except the conventional, seem in 
fiftvour : if nature is glorified here, art is extolled 
there: if the gloom of the north bewitch these, those 
are allured by the brilliance of the south, or the 
luxuriance of the east. I shall therefore simply 
draw out certain forms of /tlie m6vement which I "^ 
conceive to have an equal right to inclusion in it: 
and by analysing the several modes of negative 
revolt evolve the corresponding objects of positive 
aspiration. 

§ 5. We may discern, as the first mode of the 
Romantic, i^ attraction to a sensuous, vivid, fantastic, 
even unreal, art For art is certainly regarded with 
favour, however surprising it may appear, even by 
the opponents of an artificial, if not artistic poetry. 
But th^n, it would seem, the art must be of a £Ar 



I 



ft BBKniAL CHinicrmgncs of thx [ce. l 



different genius: it nknst b^ the art which begniletf 
the aenaes bj vari^iation, not that ifhieh channs the 
inteUect bj ajrmmetiT; the art which lelieres the 
OMMiotony rather than the disorder of the world; 
The Bomantic poet» weary of the drab hues of the ' || 

age of understanding, tamed to the brilliance of an . 
age of fancy, and in his impatience of the rationality 
which he called impiety, and of the order which he 
called routine, was the better pleased if the colours 
were overchaiged, and the forms out of drawing. 
Every analysis of the movement must recognise as 
an element in it a certain caprice or waywardness 
of taste, which is attracted less by the intrinsic 
charm of beauty than by its incidental unreality. 
The wilfulness of defiance, now petulant now sportive, 
mingles with the single mind of art 

An important element of this tendency to the 
arbitrary or fantastic is the love of wnhutL Unity, 
subordination, harmony, are among the most obvious 
attributes of classicism! diversity, picturesqueness, 
and a sort of emulous self-assertion of each part, are 
conventionally assigned to the Bomantia This has 
in &ct been regarded as the very centre of the 
antagonism by one who, if not the leading poet of 
the Bomantic school of (Sermany, was certainly its 
greatest critic and its most refined translator^* 
August Wilhelm SchlegeL ''The whole play of 
vital motion** he says in the first lecture on the 
Drama "hinges on harmofny and wnttaait. Why 



§§ 5, 6.] BOMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 

then should not this phenomenon zecur on a grander 
scale in the history of man? In this ide»a we have 
perhaps disoovered the true key to the ancient and 
modem history of poetry uid the fine arts. Those 
who adopted it gave to the peculiar spirit of modem 
art, as contrasted with the antique or classical, the 
name of ^oman^*' 

But though Schlegel lived to see the movement 
which he had helped to guide in Oertnany ebb out 
or lose itself in more catholic tendencies of art, at 
the time he wrote his lectures (1811) its growth was 
still incomplete in England, and was quite incipient 
in France. Ht^ could not yet entirely compass ten- 
dencies which, as they assumed the same name, 
cannot for us be separated from it. I accordingly 
admit this as perhaps the most important canon of 
the Romantic ideal in art, but still not as entirely 
comprehensive. 

§ 6. Dissatisfaction with the contemporary 
world may find refuge in another way. Instead of 
seeking arbitrary and eccentric combinations of 
sensuous forms, it may fall into the point of view of 
the mystic, and inform even the naked prose of 
common life with a mysterious charm, by regarding 
as the veil of something which is not seen all that 
we see. Instead of rejecting the repulsiveness of 
reality, it may dissolve it in the glamour of sym* 
holism : instead of resisting or forgetting, accept and 
idealise it A more spiritual side of the movement 



10 naxnuou eBAJuenaasam of tarn [col i» 

eomM oai liate; with as doM an affimijr to idigioiiy 
MibefonikerhastotlieseiimoiiaiiMCofart Foeiiy^ 
wliich can lepreaeiit both, shews lieie Buikcd tness 
of the foimer, and the poetie fiusnlty is assunOated to 
the insiHxation of the prophet^ instead of to the skill 
(^ the artist*. 

It is easy to see how those dominated hj this 
sense of mysteiy should be especially attract^ to the 
religioiis and supentitions attitude of the naive mind, 
and especially of the mediaoTal mind. Hence Bo- 
manticpoetry is as essentially mysterious as it is bright 
and fantastic : the suggestiyeness and infinity of gloom 
belong to it .as much as the finiteness and complete- 
ness of colour. The shadowy depths of the forest^ 
haunted with gnome and dwarf, the lonely mountain 
in whose side Barbarossa has his palace, and where 
his horses pant impatient for the night»hunt» these 
belong to one side of the Bomantic genius ; to the 
other, the gay pageantry of chivalrous war and the 
brilliant posing of Proven^ love. 

These two sides of the genius of Bomance may 
without excessive refinement be described as respec* 
tively northern and southern. The Teutonic sjnrit 
indeed enters into both, just as the Teutonic race was 
largely mingled even with the races which spoke the 
Bomance tongues. But in the south, the bright- 

^ B,g. Kovilifl oonndond flist *der poetiidia 8iim SMlur Vos 

wmdaehaft mit dem Slnne fur Wdaagiing, mh dem 
dem Wfthnrinn baC 



T-^*" — T' •• • l""iii II , I ji rriT I ni-|iiin i i iii.i.iril -i.l—rYtl 



I § 6.] BOMANTIC AKD CLASSICAL 8XTLES. 11 

' n688 of nature inspired a sensuous and gaily-coloured 
poetiy and Arabian influence— to i? hich the Trou* 
badours owed not a little-encouraged this tendency^ 
and stimulate an ornate and elaborate style of art : 
while the self-asserting individuality of the Teuton 
enhanced an unreserve in expression which the 
moderation of Greek genius, quick and southern as 
it was in emotioni had forbidden. 

Mystery on the other hand is pre«eminently a 
Teutonic quality. Doubtless the thought of all 
peoples is at a certain stage penetrated by the in- 
stinctive conviction that what they see is a veil of 
something they do not see : and the Aryan peoples, 
more especially, share in common a mythology whose 
essential quality of* mystery no one of them entirely 
overcame. The worship at Eleusis was as mysterious 
in our sense as in the more special meaning of the 
Greek; the rites of summoning derxl spirits are 
impressive even in Aristophanes, and those of re* 
calling a faithless husband still retain an element of 
weirdness in the disillusioned age of Theokritos. 
But neither Greek nor Boman retained so fully as 
the Teutonic peoples the genuine sentiment of the 
mysterious. The Greek was too plastic, the Boman 
too prosaic. The former embodied so vividly that 
something which he felt informing the things he 
saWy that the impressiveness of the unknown forsook 
it^ and it assumed almost the fSuniliarity of sense. 
In the lat^, on the other hand, the intixition of the. 



Wfl9l*^^'^9f'''*i^'^'^f^Mmmmmmmmmmm t tm*ttmm»tw »M 



I 



IS SBSBniAL GBAXACRBBIIC8 OV.THS [CH. I.* 

ankBown had m Utile penisleiiee that he nadily 
dropped the whole scheme of theo^t which implied 
it^ and xetained aa Olympus of empty namea, aapplied, 
by the ambition of p<ditical asfuianta^ with a ritoal 
no less empty. Thus the frank imagination of 
Oieeoe, intolerant of the obscnre, impatient of the 
formless and the indistinct, tended almost as mnch 
by assimilating the unknown as did the dull imagi* 
nation of Rome by relinqnishing it^ to destroy the 
mysterious. Only when the Teuton broke in upon 
their decaying splendour and power, with his 
persistent assertion of an ideal world and his 
defective plastic power of representing it, was the 
sense of the mysterious thoroughly developed : only 
then was that union of light and darkness, that 
twilight of imagination which lies between periect 
deamess and complete unconsciousness, at length 
realised* Greece was like the radiance of midday, 
which as with abold chisel determines and completes 
whatever is vague and incipient: Some the total 
darkness which excludes even the suggestion of form : 
while to the Middle Ages belongs that hour of 
dusk when eveiy shape at once prompts wonder 
and refuses to gratify it, a symbol and a veil, a 
union of inexhaustible suggestiveness and inexorable 
limitation. 

§7. The ideals just characterised as the 
&ntastic and the mysterious comprise between them 
a large part of what is strictly Romantic, To aim 



Mt*m'''^wi00tfm*9umi't'im0m>mmmt-mmmmmm0t'it0mm0m0''m^t»^m»*i0'^'**n-^*i^mmmi0>mmi 



§§ 6, 7.] BOMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 13 

at these qualities was to be unreservedly Bomantia 
We have now to examine two moyements wliich as a 
))art of the anti-classical reaction were teally more 
important than these, and which though indifferent 
or even hostile to Bomanticism in one aspect, in 
another formed part of it^ and gave a characteristic 
turn to its literary creed. 

Consider first the great and complex movement 
towards nature. It is essential to the comprehension 
of Bomanticism — ^more especially in France, — ^to 
distinguish two currents as it were, in the stream, 
which, at times blended, at other times appear 
directly hostile. Nature in poetry, nature in poli- 
tics, — ardent idealism might suppose them the most 
easily harmonised of ends: and yet their several 
advocates could be separated by the whole difference 
between the Bevolution, and the reaction which half 
overcame its ebbing tida To the men of the Bevo* 
lution nature and freedom were synonymous; it 
was Bousseau, its prophet, who had cried that in 
this corrupt and civilised world man, naturally free, 
was eveiywhere in chains. To the men of the re« 
action politically indeed the ' state of nature ' might 
be full of bitter and repulsive suggestion : and they 
sought to blot out the memory of it» by restoring 
their nobles, king and Christianity. But the very 
ideal they sought led them back to the ages 
when feudal power, if not unresisted, was on the 
whole supreme, and when Catholicism, if not un« 






•1 



U jBBBmUp GBABAcmuomcB or ram [ch. l 

qocilaoiied, alvmjt goi the beittar of ito quettjonenu 
Hen bowe^rer thejr had a 4^mnnHm ftand^MMiit iriih 
thofle whom purely litenij sympalhies were dmwing 
that way. To revire the UBtremmeDed reeliam of 
the ages which preceded Malherbe, to write with fiee 5 

obedience to impiilfle, to let nature create its own c 

ait^ to speak without restnint of things which 9k 
simpler age was not yet so refined as to think un- 
poetical — in all this the pursuit of nature in litecar 
ture fell in with the reaction in politics. But on 
another side it no less obviously fell in with the 
BevolutioQ. For what did this pursuit ct nature 
mean but a revolt from the canons which since the 
17th c^itury had been observed in poetzy, and 
whose authority had seined to grow with their age f 

From the double front which the literary move* J 

ment towards nature thus inevitably assumed, re* 1 

suited a similar diversity in the political and religious ] 

attitude which its members adopted. All with some* \ 

thii!2 of revolutionary temper sought an ideal more * 

or less associated with the past: but some, their ^> 

temper associated with the political revolution: 
others their ideal allied to the political reaction. On 
the one side aristocracy, conservatism, religion; on 
the other, democracy, radicalism, scepticism. Here 
we find a reactionary noble like Chateaubriand or 
a feudal chieftain like Scott: there a Wordsworth \ 

or a Coleridge, opening their poetic careers with ] 

glowing tributes to the levellers of Paris. Here the 1 



I 



«il**«|M#*PttaMWt*^iW«tMM«a»*«rt*fM«H*taM«i««MBiVIM«Mi*«%M««M«M«*>< 



III I ii>n|w>rtiMw»iMM 



H] 



BOXAMTK) AND CLASSICAL BTTLBS. 



15 



\. 



gift of poetry is assimilated to the religious ecstasy, 
and its exercise leads a Schlegel and a Werner to 
that church which was at once the most conspicuous 
spiritual power and the most vital remnant of me- 
diaeral life : there, Shelley is expelled from Oxford 
for atheism^ and refuses at the oost of a fortune to 
recognise primogeniture. That mohility of political 
principle which was not inconsistent with adherence 
to artistic £uth is especially seen in the history of 
the French Romantic school In the c^nade of 
1827, ardour for literary emancipation was easily 
combined with devotion to king and priest. Its 
members could write enthusiastic defences of the 
Bourbons and Catholicism with the same bands 
which were consummating the revolt against the 
canons and unities of classic prescription. It seemed 
as if it were reserved for the very poets who appeared 
to aim at restoring all that the Revolution had de- 
stroyed, to destroy the single pillar it had spared. 
And it is equally easy to see how when the change 
came, their literary practico did not likewise suffer 
revolution : how Victor Hugo for example could be 
no less a leader in Romantic poetry after Ste. Beuve 
had converted him (as he claimed) to democracy, 
than when still full of the new wine of the Restora- 
tion : just as, conversely, Coleridge «ould impress a 
similar literary stamp upon the odes with which he 
welcomed the Revolution, and on the too rare fugi- 
tive pieces of the latter days when he 'sat upon 



i|!|PWW[y| i ii mj ii MMU P luw m w 



mm^mtm^mmfsm^mfffrmm 



r^;|«MV«)lMWMqFMnl 



10 BSElinAL GHABACRBI8IIG8 OP TBE [OB. ^ 

ffigbgate hill^' the ooiypliaeiis in KngUurl of myitie 
theology. 

It will now be clearer whet element the move^ 
ment towards Nature, thna eomplezly related to the 
Bomantic movement^ oontiibated to it. It was the 
Tariety of nature unchecked by an edectic art; the 
profusion of foims and coloun, of lights and shades, 
ministering in every way to the love of oortrest :— 
beauty mingled with ugliness, the strong with the 
weak, the graceful with the grotesque, the charming 
with the repelling, the grave with the gay. And 
thus we explain the apparent paradox that art and 
nature should be equally associated with Bomantic 
poetry : that in one {dace there is nothing in nature, 
however perfect, that it will not alter, in another 
nothing, however monstrous^ that it wiU not retain. 
Fantastic art and natural reall**m have both a diare 
in it ; it is at once ideal and reaL It accepts the 
contrasts of nature, and where they are too delicate 
amplifies them by art. 

Realism then may be laid down as the third 
mode of Romantic contrast 

§ 8. But yet another movement contributed 
indirectly to form the ideal of Romanticism. An 
age of deeper passion was c jme, and higher suscepti- 
bility to emotion naturally led to a higher estimation 
of it. EInthusiasm, depreciated by a Locke, a 
Shaftesbury, a Hume, was now assimilated to in* 

^ Carl j]e*i £.f/e of SUrUug. 



i 



§ 8.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 17 

spiratioQ, and calm rationality to mechanical routine. 
The age of * force' and 'genins' was at hand, with 
its Carlylos and Emersons, its exaggeration of the 
power of the individual, its neglect of the inertia 
of the race. Forcible individuality always tends to 
an inlituation of self-confidence. From its first 
nidve intuition that all men are possessed by its 
own ardour, it passes to an impatient recognition 
of an opposing world, which however it is confident 
of subduing : finally it seeks refuge from a hopeless 
struggle wnth the present in the image of an ideal 
post or future. The history of the German Romantic 
school distinctly exhibits these two latter phases. 
To idealise the real, to inform Philistinism with 
genius, to animate the dull mechanism of routine ; 
to give to the stiff conventional outlines of the 
prosaic world they knew, the flow of beauty and the 
boldness of strength, to pervade with the spirit of 
poetry all ages, . classes, employments, pursuits and 
relations; this was their great inspiration. They 
seized the less conventional sides of contemporary 
life, and invested them with an ideal dignity and 
significance. Thus Schiller in his early years glorified 
the forest-robber, and numbers of the German }^outIi 
became Karl Moors in real life. 

In the same spirit they naturally turned to those 
poets who had combined poetry with practical activity, 
like Dante, or with a common handicraft like Sachs *• 

^ Otnimu, OtHK d> ifut$eken LUerat*r, 
H. 2 



mma0i^9mmm^mmtf''fi9m^/limffmmmi^^ •"•> » ^^^mmmffmmmmmm 



18 nSBHTIAL CBABAGmUTIGB OV IHS [CH. I. 

TImj lingered over the tnditioiia of dutaliy, when 
the inspirailoii of the poet enfotced the aoldierX 
and the bsion'e feest wm inoomiilete without the 
minstrel's song. And natandly, as the tii%k of 
transfonning the inveterate prose of the present 
appeared more and more impossible, ihej assumed 
with the more fixity a retrospective attitude. In a 
word, the mediaevalism already prompted by Oatholic 
sentimenty and aversion to AufUarung, was rein* 
forced by the enthusiasm of poetry. 

It need hardly be pointed out how other kinds 
also of powerful sentiment, repelled by uncongenial 
realities, sought refuge in the same direction; how 
the story of Dante was cheriahed for its mystic love, 
that of S. Louis for mystic religion: how a more 
sensuous passion lingered over the tale of Abelard, 
the legend of Lancelot; and how the very extrava- 
gance of chivalrous love, which could worship a 
name and ^arch through Europe the owner of a 
iSftce on a locket, powerfully attracted men weaiy of 
the less ideal and — ^in the conventional but here 
not inapt phrase — the less romantic affections of 
their day. 

It is clear then how the wave of tenser emotion 
which broke upon western Europe towards the end 
of the last century fell in with the other influences 
which promoted a retrospective culture. It is 
obvious also in what direction it would revolt from 
the classic models of style. The unrestrained utter- 



„«•«» 4 mn ' ii^i>»i >■ iw — ^» w<ii»l»*M ^ » ^ Mi^Titlwww-intnn-i r-"-^-*i' 



§§ 8,«9.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 10 



q{ pasalon, the eynipathetic diffuseness of the 
naive narrator and even the prolix enthusiasm of 
the less inspired ballad-maker, now commend them- 
selves, to the poet as precious qualities of poetry. ' 
Sentiment, however obtrusive, is never coldly re- 
ceivedj. Tlie drama of Schiller is in fact typical 
of this side of Romanticism, as Shakspere*s is 
of its inexhaustible variety. When Schiller blamed 
Shakspere for the "coldness with which he can joke 
in the midst of tragedy,'' he was really dividing 
Romanticism against itself; he was arraying senti- 
mentality against the abruptness of contrast which 
apparently, though not necessarily, excludes it. 
This is one of the inevitable paradoxes of the 
subject. ' 

§ 9. The above review, though ostensibly con- 
fined to the Romantic, has already indicated by 
implication, the qualities to be regarded as classic. 
Classicism opposes to the arbitrariness of fancy a 
pervading rationality; to the mysterious the intelli- 
gible : to the unpruned variety of nature the limita- 
tions of an eclectic art: to passion glorified and 
dwelt on, passion restrained and somewhat dis- 
paraged. Romanticism, on the other hand, makes > 
prominent the qualities conspicuous in the youth of 
a nation ; bright aimless fancy, awe of the unknown, 
eager uncritical delight in the abundance of natui-e ; 
impetuous joy and sorrow, breaking forth into such 
free and instant tears and smiles as the Argonauts 

2—2 



I 

I 



mm^iff^fifggiffifffmtmmmmm^mimmmmmi^^ '^ n * 'm mmfmmif$tfm m mm u m w > 



20 BBmiTUL CHARiLCTKHnmOB OF THS [CH. I. 

attered, or the eomndes of OdyBseua. InCUattciam 
an age of undentanding and refinement seyerely » 
asserts its rights : and ezdudes whatever cannot be 
brought to its test ; all that is obscure^ lednndant or 
defective, too prominent or too onobtniflive for its 
part, or which suggests undignified or repellent as- 
sociations. Unity of form is blended with eclecticism . 
in subject ; the taste of an exclusive age is seen in ' 
the choice of the latter, that of a^ intellectual age 
in the treatment of the former. Of these two elements 
the exdusiveness tends with the growth of a more 
catholic cidture to diminiA, whUe aa enlarged , 
understanding becomes capable of imposing a unity 
not less complete but only more complex upon more 
diverse matter. And thus the antagonism of the 
two movements tends, as has been said, to dissolvei 
the more permanent elements of each persisting, 
while the more transitory drop out. The wide 
outlook of Romantidsm is accepted by a new gene- 
ration which at the same time rejects its wilful t 
eccentricities. The nature, the passion, the mystery, 4 
the groiesqueness and the repulsiveness which it 
freely admitted are no longer ejected absolutely 
from the palsce of art Neither, however, do they 
any longer enter it like a motley and disorderly 
throng, where each thrusts himself forward and 
speaks as of equal right at equal length. They 
appear rather as members of an organic whole where 
each has a function which he neither exceeds nor 



§0.] 



BOMAimC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 



21 



falls short of; where one is the central dominating 
figure, and another appears for a moment, to speak 
a line. 

These then are what is permanent in the prin- 
ciples of Romantic and Classical art, and which, like 
whatever else is permanent, cannot ultimately con* 
flict Each schoai seised upon a fragment and ex- 
aggerated its value : only when the fragments were 
CDmbined in a higher synthesis could the complete 
sphere of art be formed. 



CP^ 



mmmm 



mm 



^■^■llH^yw— <»*»™*.*»#»W>»W^«ww— y>M iiinwf< 



22 EBBBHTUL CHABACnOUSnGB OP TSS [CSL IL 



GHAFTEB IL 

' PUVCIFLB OP 8RLB BXEMPUPIED IH VEBttB. 

§ 10. Thb ftnictore of Vene may be rqjudad 
as the motfe eztenial mod fonnal part of style. The 
{Nrinciples it involyes are few and obvioofl^ and its 
chaiacter is for the most part stamped npon its fiioe. 
It will therbfore be well to begin with a brief discus- 
sion of Bomsntic -and Clasacsl verBe, aa which the 
essential marks of the two styles are impressed in a 
manner elementary, yet clear. 

To begin with the latter. According to the 
previous discussion, we .may expect a verse marked 
by conscious, deliberate and studious art, as the 
fruit of a'Humanist age that glories in man, and in 
whatever is most distinctive of man; a verse re- 
served in the expression of the more naive and 
unconventional qualities, and anxious not to betray 
enthusiasm (in the 18th century sense) by running 
out of bounds; a verse, moreover, symmetrical 
rather than various, partly firoin a general preference 
for the former quality, and partly from the disposi- 
tion to make it predominate in the more external 
and formal sphere. All these qualities are embodied 
in the so-called heroic couplet^ as used by the 



1 
I 



§ 10.] BOMAKTIC AND CLASSICAL STTLSS. 23 

classicists of England In one respect indeed this 
measure is less characteristically classic than the 
• Alexandrine employed by those of France; inasmudi 
i as its five accents fall less easily into a perfectly 
I symmetrical line. This must in fiict be regarded as 
{ an essentially Romantic element perpetuated by a 
national tradition too deeply fixed to be altered. 
The Classical poets, however, did their utmost to 
transform the foreign metal in which they were 
compelled to work, and to obliterate as far as 
possible all suggestion 'of their barbarous precursors. 
Within the limits of the line, the rhythm had 
been unrestrained ; they studied to make it fre^^ 
quently fall into two symmetrical movements. The 
iambus had been freely replaced by a trochee ; they 
restricted this license within the narrowest limits. 
The sense had flowed habitually beyond the couplet : 
they made every couplet a unit in a symmetrical 
series. Double rimes had been commonly used, by 
Chaucer habitually; they banished them almost 
entirely ^ Such irregularities in metre as the 
occasional Alexandrine and the triplet, which were 
mere excrescences in the genial luxuriance of 
Dryden's style, became conspicuous anomalies in the 
pointed artificiality of Pope's. They suggested the 
riotous excess of a genius too freely indulged, and 
in his later poems he wholly abandoned them. 

> Pope** wdl loiawn eoupltl abcmt 'leather and pnmella* 
is oDt M tiM lais sxMptions* 



24 nsmiAL CBAXACfKBianGB OW THX [gh. il 

§ 11. It is kfli 6MJ to. indicate any siiij^ 
rhyUun whidi is exduttvely or especially Romaatio. 
As d^iatioii is more manifold than omfiurmity, the 
license of nature than the restraint of art^ so the 
Bomantic genius revels in a thousand fonns^ where 
the Classical perfects * few. We may however note 
two principal classes of form which are characteristie 
of it. The impatience of the ordinaiy, of the light 
and air of common day, which belongs to the Bo* 
mantic genius, would find expression in a yerse which 
either permitted, or by its very form involved, the 
utmost variety of effect The blank verse of the 
Elisabethan, by its veiy freedom allowed the greatest 
diversity of rhythm, and lent itself with the utmost 
flexibility to every variation in the hue or the ten* 
sion of emotion. The complex rimed stanzas of the 
Italians and Froven^Is, on the other hand, while 
they rather checked variety of rhythm, imposed by 
their very structure a variety more mechanical 
indeed, but at the same time more striking and 
emphatic The one method, the more Teutonic and 
northern, has greater ri^;ard for the inner movement 
of thought ; the other bears the more external and 
sensuous stamp of the south, using a feature of form 
which has least relation to the meaning. But the 
two types are intimately blended. As the Teutonic 
element in the races of Italy, Spain and France 
bad influenced the literature of those countries, so 
£) .gland in turn blended the artificial Bomantic 



I 

• * 

I' 
t 

I 



. § 11.] BOMAKTIC Aim CLASSICAL STYLES. 25 

forms with the more flexible indigenous ones. 
Chaucer had created by his French and Italian 
rhythms — especially the heroic couplet and the seven- 
line stanza — a powerful tradition, one too powerful 
for any of his successorsy even the author of Piers 
I^owman, to overcome. Surrey and Wyatt natural- 
ised the sonnet, and Spenser the ocirain, with a 
characteristic addition of his own\ He also gave 
brilliant treatment, in his lesser poems, to many 
other measures, e,g. six-line stanzas of different 
types {Sheph, Cal, Jan. Oct. and Dec), the rimed 
couplet (lb. Mat/e, February, Motiier HubbarcTs Tale)^ 
seven-line stanza (Daphnaxda), and more complicated 
stanzas in the Prothalamium and Epithalamium. 

And the blending of these two types of verse 
produced a third method of obtaining variety, still 
more specifically Romantic than either; that, namely, 
in which the inferior variety of the rimed and syllabic 
verse was brought into contrast with the greater 
variety of the native rhythm, by the use of a verse in 
which the former was normal, the latter habitual, so 
that every use of it caused a piquant irregularity 
which is essentially Romantic. 

I have already noticed the changes which the 
poets introduced into the rimed couplet; 



1 The oompUz tttnsM of MUa and the BatiU of HaiHngg 
(hoik Tenions) deaerre mention hj the side of Spenser's, who 
doubtless suggested them. Chatterton was probablj begmled by 
the affeeied archaism of Spenser into the use of stanxas as anaohit^ 
nous aa hia language. 



mvmmmmmimm^mmmmimmii^mmmmimmmm i ^ ili> M ii» w ii> » i m iii m i 



i^^. !,..,...... ...... . p.iMi ■M.,v> ri - piiBiina ii ip|di • ini i^w m^iw^.mmiimimimw^tmmmmmmm 



S6 B8BHTIAL CHJUUCnBBI8II£8 OF THS [CH. IL 

ehanges which gmire to nme aa eDtiiely diflbraiit 
artistic effect^ ngnificant of the new school of genius 
it was to serra For nothing can be more nnlike in 
effect than Terse in which the sense mns freetj on, 
and that m which a pause at the end of line or 
coaplet is habitoaL In the latter case the rime 
coinciding with the divisions of the sense, only 
acoentiiates its regularity: just as the recurring 
strokes of the drum emphasise the regular march of 
soldiers; in the former, the very sjrmmetcy of the 
rime throws off the unrestraint of the sense, as the 
same drum heightens the effect of an irregular 
march; and the use which — ^beside Spenser — Shel- 
ley, Keats and Browning* have made of it, shews 
that it is as capable of a Romantic as, in its more 
familiar use, of a Classical effect. 

In a similar way, every deviation from the normal 
structure of verse, even by a nearer approach to 
the unfettered language of prose, has an irregular, 
piquant^ and essentially Romantic effect : e.g. 

"And ftU the windi^ wandering along Iha ibora^ 
Undulate with the nndnlating tide." 

In cases like this, the normal rhythm, running as 
a sort of undertone in the imagination^ sets off the 
strangeness of the rhythm which meets the ear. 
In prose, on the other hand, comparative irregularity 

> Efiptyehidi&m^ E:idjfmitm^ Xawla, Suidello, Ct loo the variety 
of moYunenit which Hogo and Mnaaal .introdoee into the Altfuui- 
dri2*6^ still retaining the rime. 



.: 



§ 11.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 9!J 

of rhythm is normal, and has the effect of regularity. 
Elisabethan blank Terse presents many other appli- 
cations of t^is principle ; for example, the occasional 
half-linesS both within and at the end of a speech, 
and the irregular metre of lines broken by a pause. 
Of the former kind an example is— 

**Tlio miaenble bsTS no other mfldioins 
But onlj hope : 
Vf% hope io liye, ftnd am prepered to die.** 

Claudio^ in '* Measare for Measure.** 

Of the latter, the iamous passage in the same scene :— • 
"Than the ioft myrtle; hot man, proud man,'* 

which Coleridge, always most subtle in discerning 
Romantic traits, so zealously defended*. 

The same character belongs — ^though in a less 
degree because less irregularity is involved'— to the 
variety in degree of accent which marks the Elisa* 
bethan iambic. Of the five normal accents Shaks- 
pere frequently uses three only, as in 



A 16cal habitation and a n&me... 
The 16nati0| the l<Sver and the p6et... 
And diity in his service perishing. •• 
Make periods in the midst of sentences, &c...« 

> Similarly it it eeientlally a Bomantte trait to admire as raoh, 
what Dr Newman ealls ' the pathetie halMinee of Vergil.* Which 
howefer the genius of olaesio art oompela ua io attribute merely 
to the absence of eoirection. 

* L^etvrcf on Skaketpen, 













gbe^h^^a^ modem 
:g:i*lKgSl|ie|;I)ro<lig«l 
"' ■""""■ ""' "".a chann 



I 5*1- jJJ«.|-i§! ^u^ !g;iS:£w«tiire- 



§ 12.] BOMAKTIC Aim CLASSICAL 8TTLE8. 29 



CHAPTER IIL 

STTLE AS MATERULLT AFFECTED.— REALISM. 

§ 12. Victor Hugo, in the famous preface to 
Cromwell which served as the manifesto of the 
French Romantic school, declared that the epic was 
the jif culiarly antique, the dmma the characteristi- 
cally modem, form of art. The drama combines 
all elements of life, — ^body and mind, sense and 
intellect, grotesqueness and beauty. Its ideal is to 
express character vividly, to accumulate individuali- 
ties and emphasise differences, to bring the most 
varied -material into sharpest contrast. Now this 
was certainly not the aim of the classical drama : 
nay, if we apply Lessing*s criticism on the relations 
of poetry and sculpture to the similar though nar- 
rower difference between descriptive poetry and 
dramatic representation, we shall allow to the lan- 
guage of the drama even a less degree of realism 
in proportion as its more direct action upon the 
senses reduces the limits within which realism is 
inoffensive. But the Romantic was less sensitive on 
this head : he loved nature as such, and from a quite 
different but ooncurring cause, he also loved contrast. 



80 xasmuii cHABAcnaasncsB op thx [gh. m; 

Both inflaenoes eamlmied to make the drama the 
moot chancteristic form of modem art Apart fiom 
differences of aabject; the epies aod the odea of 
modem times are more or less eonsdously influenoed 
by antique models. Tasso^ Dant^ Milton, Klopstock 
would have written otherwise without Homer and 
Veigil : Cowley, Dryden, Collins, Gmy» without 
Pindar: but the drama of Shakspere is in form as 
unlike, as it was probably independent o( that of 
Sophodes. 

To illustrate tliis realism, which we may now, 
without necessarily confining it to the drama, term 
dramatic, is the object of the present chapter. We 
may regard it under two aspects : first, the introduc- 
tion of certain ideas — secondly their treatment^ when 
already involved in the subject The Bomantic 
poet both admits an idea more ficeely, and brings 
it more vividly home to the imagination : the classic 
will either exclude it altogether, or, admitting it, veil 
its offensiveness. Romanticism, elsewhere seeming 
to slight reality, and to seek in gay flights of fancy, 
full of surprises and improbabilitieB, an escape firom 
the pressure of custom, here appears to embrace 
with enthusiasm whatever is offered. It is now 
realist, as elsewhere idealist: and classicism, else- 
where opposed to it from the side of the actuality of 
nature, here confronts it from the opposite camp of 
the ideality of art But the contradiction contains 
its own solution. The cause of both attitudes is the 



§ 12.] BOMANnC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 31 

same. Nature combines the two ideals. Infinitely 
various and oomprehensiTe, she at the same time 
moves with, ultimately, the utmost uniformity. 
When the Romantic adopts nature as his cry, he 
means 4t8 variety more than its regularity: and when 
he seems to abandon it, it is only that an element 
slightect before is now excluded altogether. 

This appears in many modes. Its condition is, 
as I have implied, a certain transparency of style, 
whtck-admits with no softening disguise many things 
which the conventional artist, from refinement, dig* 
nity or sensitiveness avoids — the common, the naive, 
the archaic, the rude, the repulsive ; or again, things 
which, while perfectly real and simple, or even 
because they are such, lie beyond his interest and 
sympathy. It is characteristic of the classical theory 
of style not to express these fiiUy in the language 
even where they are involved in the matter. Ac* 
cording to that theory style and thought are not 
essentially connected, the one following the other as 
the impression the mould, but are separate entities 
which may be cultivated apart and ac'x>rding to dif- 
ferent laws. 

To the Classic, style is like the loose cloak of the 
Greek, not following the contour of the frame, but 
flowing; in independent beauty; to the Romantic, in 
the aspect of him which we are now considering, it 
is like the tight dress of the Elisabethan, displaying 
unreservedly everjr line, graceful or deformed, and 



• r 



s 






^•MP«IN|M|ii«V«pm«ipl||l«IWPiipp««ift^ 



S2 nsxmAL cHiBACRKianoi of tsb [ch. m, 

almost dguucdly respondiDg to ewerj motioiL It 
may be the mere admiiwa "a of unooiiTeiitaoiial tenm 
-^-eoch as the 'handkerchief* in Othello, which at its 
first performance before a Fkris andienoe so violently 
stirred the old Adam of Ptendo-classicism— or it 
may be a oolouiing of expression, or again an effect* 
that dominates the whole style from its deepest to its • 
most superficial elements. 

I shall illustrate this under three aspects: the 
introduction of the naive, of the repulsive, and of 
what may briefly be called the subtlety and minute* 
ness of nature. For the most part I shall draw upon 
the writings of the modem Romantics — the instances 
of all in the writings' primarily Bomantic — e,g. the 
Elisabethan drama— -being suflSciently obvious. 

§ 13. A very few words will suffice to explain 
the attitude of Augustan classicism towards the naive 
and the archaia Thefera of ripe understandings 
could not sympathise with that of a simpler intelli* 
gence than its own.( An age that feels itself to be 
final is impatient of one that is obviously incomplete; 
and hazardous as are assertions of so wide a scope, 
it may safely be said that the age of Augustan 
classicism or even the 18th century in general, did 
attribute to their state far more finality than any 
one now ventures to assert of the conditions of the 
19th. 

The temper of such an age excluded too the 
archaic turns which it afterwards became the creed 



§ 13.] nOMAKTIC AKD CLASSICAL STYLEa 33 

of a mcdioevalising poetry to revive. They bore the 
musty odour of the past like the old manuscripts 
which contained them; and were no more to be 
introduced among the well-bred idioms of the 
eighteenth century than the old crooked blackletter 
was to be permitted to mingle with the clear and 
elegant modem typ6\ 

In the modem Rom<antic school it is of course 
necessary to distinguish between an archaism or 
naivete which is purely dramatic aid one which is 
the expression of the writer's own retrospective sen- 
timent. In Keats, e.^., it is very largely personal. 
Tn Chatterton, whose great capacity for imaginative 
sympathy with the past was united with no t-ouch 
of Romantic sentiment, it is wholly dramatic. In 
Spenser, — whose Hobbinols and Colins* often forget 
their archaism in sudden bursts of poetry, — it is 
doubtless partly dramatic ; but Spenser^ unlike most 
of his contemporaries, had something * f the modem 
Romantic sentiment; and his archaism reflects his 
own imaginative' delight in the past of chivalry, of 
Arthur, of Roland, however inappropriate to such 

> It is trne that Pope in deseribing the self-critieism of Ube 
men who write such Tene as we can read,* bide them oocaaionally 

** In downright charity reriTe the dead : 
Mark where a bold exprcMive phrase appears, 
Bright with tiie rubbish of a hundred years ; 
Conunand old words that long have slept to wake. 
Words that wise Baeon or brave Baleigh spake." 

Bot he ean haidlj be said to have aoted on the injunction, 

' A rustle nomenclature, whioh Pope takes eredil for not 
imitating in his PoiiofuU^ 

H. 3 



34 nunUL CHAEACTSBBXlOi QT TBI [CB.IIL 

Ml age may be the paitirnlar kind and degree of 
aidiaiam whidi be ainwiTBed, And Spenaer, like 
ChaUerton, often belies tbe ainiplicity of the age 
whoee language he affects by an ornate splendour 
of imageiy hardly known before the Renascence. 
Keat8» too, in his Eve of St Agnu, and IwbeUa, con- 
stantly suggests the tone of naive sympathy with 
which Chaucer teUs a pathetic story. How pointedly 
unlike the calm dignity of conventional narrative is 
the opening of the former poem : 

-Si AgoM* £t«! ah. luttor chiU it wm^" Ae. 
and of the latter 

••Fair Isabel; poor simple loftbel! 

Loranzo. a young palmer in Lo««'t eja, 
Thi^ eoold nd in the eeUeanie i^^wgi^^fi dwell, 
Withoat lome sdr of heart, lome malad/:** 

yet the intervals are short in which the rich imagi- 
nation of the modem does not break through this 
affected simplicity ; for example in the third stanza^ 
where the 'ancient Beadman* is described passing 
along the dim chapcl-aisle ; 

"And Bcaioe three ttepe ere Jfune't poidem Umgrn^ 
Flaiiered to Uan this aged man and poor:*' 

a list of Shaksperian richness inlaid, like a 'patine 
of bright gold/ in the simple language of Chaucer. 

More purely dramatic is the exquisite simplicity 
devoid of 'archaism with which Mr Browning can 
inspire a childlike character; and notably his /bm- 
pilia. On the other hand, the naivete of which 
Wordsworth in his earlier days so eagerly made his 
poetry the vehicle can only be called with a qualifi- 



§§ 13, 14.] BOHANTIC AND CLASSICAL 8T7LSS* 35 



I 



cation Bomantic; it inyolves too largely for the 
most part that flavour of the modera age, which the 
Romantics sought to avoid. The realism of style 
which they extol relates only to a historical reality. 
Shakspere, in parts a decided realist, they accept 
because time has drawn a magic veil between, which 
to our eyes invests his grossest realities with some- 
thing of ideality : but let another Shakspere treat 
the 19th century, as he treated parts of the ICth, 
and they would turn away with chilled admiration 
from a pencil whose perverse fidelity only made 
more vivid the conventionalities they loathed. 

§ 14. As the Romantic admission of the naive 
oflended the classical worship of intelligence, and its 
proneness to the mysterious the classical demand 
for intelligibility, so its acceptance of what is gro^ 
tesque^or repulsive outraged the classical require- 
ment of elegance. The social contrast to which this 
opposition points, and on which it rests, is equally 
plain. The society of the salon, which while it 
delighted in a veiled meaning would tolerate neither 
a childishly simple, nor a mystically obscure one, was 
equally imperative in bauishiug the uncouth, the 
rude, the repelling. 

In fact the modern Romantic admission of the 
repulsive rested on exceedingly complex conditions. 
It was partly, due to that higher sense of beauty, 
which finds an aesthetic Value in discord. It wao 
not only an assertion of nature against the exclusive- 

3—2 



96 nsKHTUL GHAm^crERuncB OF THB [ciL m; 



of an aitificuJ Bodeij, Imt also an attack upon 
the imperfeet aesthetic inaght which made it ezclu* 
siTe. BcYolt against the privileges cf pore beantjr 
as such, was added to disparagement of the kind of 
heanty which had hitherto alone enjoyed them. 
The artistic oppomtion of variety to monotony, the 
political opposition of the outcast to the privilqpd, 
the antiquarian opposition of mediaeval unreserve to 
modem refinement, the ethical opposition of mediae* 
val asoeticbm to modem hedonism ; finally, the more 
general antagonism of power to the canors of a 
shallow taste, — all these are resumed and united 
in the modem Romantic admission of the repulsive. 

In France Victor Hugo vehemently asserted its 
rights in hii\ and did not a little to put in practice 
his own precepts*. In England Wordsworth's famous 
prebce^ though written from a different Qoint of 
view — the poetical value of the natural language of 
passion, — ^involved a similar admission of elements 
repulsive to conventional refinement In Words- 
worth, however, this aspect of the theory affected 
merely a phase of his poetiy, which on the whole is 
marked hy a classic selectness of phrase and thought. 
It is Coleridge above all, — Coleridge the self-chosen 
poet of the supernatural element in Romance,— who 
dared in the vividest and most searching words to 
portray things repulsive and horrible, holding 

* IVeface to CnmwelL 



§ 14.] BOXAKTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 



87 



readersi as the Mariner held the wedding-guest, 
spell-bound till they have heard every detail of his 
'ghastly tale/ 

''Th« T6iy deep did roi: O ChrUl 
Thftt ever each thingi should be: 
Tea, ■limy ihinge did exeop with lege 
Upon the elimy tea." 

None of Coleridgo*s contemporaries approached him 
here. Scott' had perhaps drunk not less deeply 
of the Romantic genius ; but his Tory attachment 
to the past included a certain deference to the 
literary tone of the 18th century. His eye was 
caught by the brilliance of chivalry and the more 
picturesque lights and shadows which checker High- 
land life: but he shrank from offending the tradi- 
tions of an elegant literature by exposing its more 
savage aspects. Keats was too much in love with 
pure beauty to lacerate his senses willingly with 
unsightly images. It is characteristic of him that 
in the description of tho unearthing of Lorenso, in 
I$abdla, he breaks off suddenly : 

*'Ah wherefore aU this wormy eirenmetanee T 

Why linger at the yawning tomb to long? 
O for the genUeneee of old Bomance^ 

Tho limple plaining of a minstrel*! song I 
Fair reader, at the old tale take a glanee, 

For here in truth it does not well belong 
To speak; O torn thee to the veiy tale, 

And taste the mosie of that vision pale.*' 

> This rsferenoe does not indode the prose writings of Scott 



mm 



t9mmimmi9''*m''m^m^^lfi»'>m0t^tihmm0mmmH$t^ 



• I • • ^^^■■^^w 



88 JBBSttiMTIAI^ GHAEACKmnnCB OV THS \CBmUL 

And he ezpresaoi ebewbere cacplicitly (Steep ami 
Poetry) the feeling impliciily contained here >^ 

•'Strangtli alMM^ tiMN^ cT tilt IffiiMB bQCD» 
If lOw a |jRll0B angel: tiMt vp-tatn 
DMTlmeBi and ironni md ihwrndi and ■epukhw 
Ddight it; Cor it foeda apcm the bnira 
And thooia of Ufa: foigetting tha giett end 
Of poeqr» that it ehoald be a friend 
To eoothe the caiea and lUt the hetft of nan." 

This IB another instance of the conflict of complex 
motives, which we have had to notice so often. 
The sense of beauty is partly attracted bj the me* 
diaeval, partly repelled by it. 

It is in iSact necessary to pass to an age in which 
the full realism of Bomantic genius is not cheeked 
by conventional decorum, nor yet condemned by an 
over-acute sensibility. The poet who inspired Keats 
shrank from no unrefinement in the signs of his 
allegorical pictures : and it was naturally just this 
point which was chosen far parody by Pope, the 
typical poet of an age more tolerant of moral than 
of literary indecorum. It is needless to dwell upon 
the realism of Shakspere; whether the offence to 
a narrow aesthetic taste arise firom something in 
itself offensive, as in Spenser, or from something 
made so by peculiar circumstances, as where a comic 
mo^is intru'led in the climax of a tragedy. 

And as Pope has been mentioned, it is proper 
not to. forget that^ however coarsely Spenser might 
express his moral antipathy to abstract vices^ Pode 



§§ 14, 15.] BOMAimC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 39 



r 



without thought of parody entirely equalled him, 
when uttering his literary antipathy to concrete 
poets. Hatred, the passion of the era of Augustan 
classicism, produced in its poetry this troubled re- 
flexion of Romantic qualities : and there is little to 
choose in unrestrained virulence between {e,g.) Pope's 
character of 8poru$ and Shelley's outburst against 
Gifford in the Adonai$, though the unrestraint of 
the one is deliberate and classic, that of the other 
impulsive and Romantic. Realism that merely 
offends an aesthetic susceptibility may be a proprium 
of the Romantic poet : but if it will serve to give 
sting to an insult, it belongs of right to the Augustan 
classic who scarcely feels the laceration of his taste 
in the gratification of his vengeance. 

§ 15. Finally I shall briefly illustrate what I 
indicated above as realism in respect to the subtlety 
of nature. The French Romantic school in its early 
days had a favourite word which seemed felicitously 
to describe the quality they valued most in art ; — 
eiidure. It was a sort of watchword with them; 
they wrote it above their portal and forbade all to 
enter who were ignorant of it The clear-cut deli- 
neation they loved included two elements; to make 
a vivid impression on the imagination, and to portray 
nature with delicate and faithful pencil, not slurring 
details in vague generalities, but rendering them in 
all their complexity of line and subtlety of light and 
shade. No doubt here, as in the Preraphaelite move- 



I 

C 



40 BSKSTUL GHAKACnoasnOB^ Aa [GB.IIL 

ment of pdntiiig, these two auns aie ineztrieaUj 
blended : and I shall not dwell upon the distinction, 
which it is nevertheless important to remailL Take 
as illustrations these few phrases ef Keats, which 
without fiuM7-*(^ith that we are not here con- 
cerned)— Tividly describe natural hcta such as the 
clafflical poet^ a humanist who cares for nature only 
in its relation to man, passes by with unconcern: 
*the most patient brilliance of the moon/ — ^"the 
calm^throated nightingale,* — 'cool-rooted flowers,'— 
*minnows» staying their wavy bodies Against the 
streams, nestling their silver bellies on the pebbly 
sand.' 



\ 



i 



CHAPTER IV. 

8TTLE A8 FORHALLT AFFECTED (l) BY EUOTIOX. 

§ 16. " Allbs Lyrische/' says Goethe, ^'musz im 
OaDzen sehr veiDunilig, im Einzelnen ein Biszchen 
unvernttnftig sein." It has the touch of irrationality 
which belongs to the expression of imaginative pas- 
sion. It may appear strange to associate, however 
remotely, with what is meaner than man, a mode 
of tifterance which has given him the noblest poetry : 
nevertheless, it is true that the purely emotional 
element in lyric expression connects it, in so far, with 
that rude language of feeling which belongs to the 
lower animals rather than with the articulate lan- 
guage of thought which is confined to man. Doubt- 
less the form in which these characteristics appear 
is complicated and disguised by the high develop- 
ment of articulate language. It is not indeed the 
actual means of expression which are analogous; for 
the high development of articulate language has 
almost wholly substituted the symbolic implication 
for the direct expression of feeling, and left to inters 



42 nSKHTIAL CHARACfTEBISnCS OF TBI [CH. Tfu 

jeetion^ which alone now lepreaent that fbnctidii* 
merely a last despised chapter of grammar. It is 
rather in the charactetistics which accompany the 
expression than in the means consciously adopted to 
mark it that the reaemUance lies. These may be 
defined as inookerence and iteraiipm^ two features 
which doubtless often arise from other causes than 
strong feelings but^ on the other hand, are conspicu- 
ously avoided in the hinguage of calm reason. To a 
laige extent no doubt these disappear in all articulate 
language, which, so to speak, carries off the stress of 
feeling by giving it abundant scope : still, when the 
stream is strong it finds the artificial channel too 
narrow, and if it does not break out along the old 
bed it at any rate overflows the new : the utterance 
may not degenerate into mere inarticulate cries, but 
it still retains some of the characteristics of such 
cries. There is incoherence when the poet is hurried 
along too vehemently to forge each thought into 
perfect form, and flings it impatiently forth, a glowing 
but unshaped mass. Iteration too belongs as pecu- 
liarly to the language of emotion as variety and 
development to that of thought Incoherent by its 
impatience of the unessential, passion at the same 
time reiterates and dwells upon the essential. Be* 
flective thought, on the contrary, avoids equally the 
incomplete and the superfluous. 

Of tLis -nature is the contrast of Classic and Ro- 
mantic style as affected by passion. Incoherence 



wtmtm 



1 



. 



§ 16.] BOMANTIC AN]> CLASSICAL STYLES. 43 

is necessarily alien to that completeness of expres- 
sion which leaves no gaps to check the interpreting 
mind: and redundance is no less foreign to the 
artistic instinct^ which refuses either to add to, or 
without variation to repeat, what is already perfect. 
It is in fact in this region that the indictment by 
classic of Bomantic art is made with most effect 
Take first of all the case of mere literal repetition of 
a word or a phrase. This may be due to an impulse 
in wEfch either the pathetic or the imaginative ele- 
ment of lyric inspiration preponderates. Here is an 
example from Keats'. 

*'0 lleUoeholy, linger hen awhUe! 

O Mofio, mniitt, breathe despondinffly! 
" *^ *t) Echo, echo, from lome aombTe isle, 

Unknowii, Leihoan, Pigh to ti»— O right 
Spirits in grief, lift np roar heads and emile; 
Lift up jonr heads, sweet spirits, heavily.** 

One can fancy some Aristophanes ridiculing this 
pathetic Euripidean iteration, in the modem critical 
Dionysia of a Quarterly Review I Take again the 
iteration not of pathos but of impassioned imagi- 
nation in Shelley's description of the "winged in* 
lant*:"— 

••white 
Its eoontenanee, like the whiteness of white snow, 
lU hair is white, the bri^tness of white light 
Scatteved in strings.*' 

The classical poet would have been content to 

^ ttahella, ly. 
* P. Unb. Aets it. 



•.«a 



w wu i m i nK i 



iw r ii n i 



4m 



44 BS8KHTIAI. CHAKACTERISnGB OP THS [CH. IT. 



notify its ooloor once for all; the mnaaovm TiTidiiess 
of the white ooloar would have no enthralling at* 
traction to his pen; it forma indeed a part of the 
picture, and he will not omit it; but for the same 
reaacm he will not dwell on it^ and this ample 
ntterance of an imagination at white heat appears to 
him like the idle redundance of childhood. 

**^van% the lazaziant, the imecNith refiiM^ 
Bat ebow no merey to an empty line.** 

Often, again, stress of feeling produces, instead of 
absolute repetition, diffuseness. And inasmuch as 
every touch which does not add" to the completeness 
of the expression is redundant, we will begin with 
those so-called enthusiastic epithets which, giving 
no new information, merely emphasise the writer's 
feeling. . It is this transparent expression of sym- 
pathy or antipathy which gives some of its native 
charm to the style of Chaucer and to that of Spenser, 
this unreserved utterance of the poet's and artist's 
admiration of things beautiful, strong and noble, his 
repugnance to ugliness, his recoil before the hcMrible* 
'Wondrous' and •good,* 'lair' and 'lusty,' — 'cruel' 
'hideous' 'dreadful' are for ever on their lips. Such 
words, when used not descriptively but emotionally, 
are, from the standpoint of classical art, as super- 
fluous as if a sculptor should ¥rrite upon the brow of 
his statue how much he admired it Many similar 
intrusions of the poet's sympathy abound in Spenser: 
e.g. in narrative : — 



S 10.] R'lVAXnC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 45 

** Hit htfinfol hfttebei 1m hent ia huidlt 
(AUm thai il to retdy thoald ttand i) 
And lo the field tlone be tpeedeth 
{Ay, Utile help to harm there needeth I).** 

Or agaia there is the diffuseness, not as here of 
comment or ezdamation, but of needless detail; 

*'A hideout roaring far awaj they heard 
That all their tenset filled with affright; 
And ttrai^t th^ taw the raging atirgei reared 
Up to the akiet* that them ol drowning made affear*d.** 

The poet betrays his sympathy with his cha- 
racters by dwelling on their fears. Here we may 
descend to that meaner kind of diffuseness which 
arises from no Spenserian enthusiasm bat from the 
mere storyteller's egoistic insistance upon every detail 
of his tale. It is here that we are reminded of the 
tedious narratives, happily parodied in the JZtm^ of 
Sir I%apa8t of those less gifted ballad poets who 
dissented from Dryden's opinion that 'a poet ought 
to write all he ought, not all he can,^ This careful 
Attention to the 'limbs and outward flourishes'which 
do. no^ compose the soul of wit is characteristic of 
Romantic poetry in feebler hands, while extreme 
abruptness and obscure compression mark where its 
bolder spirit has been at work. The very con* 
Bpicuousness of this quality in the traditional poetry 
gave it a factitious attraction to poets who admired 
every thing old: and the writings of some of them, 
who do not deserve to be called feeble, are pervaded 
by it Keats^ for example^ even in his strictly nar- 



4t l88SirrUL GBAElCTBBianCB OF THV [CBL IT. 

imtiva poems sodi nlmEbeUu and The Eve of S. 
Agnee, gives Ids Pq^asus a Teiy loose ieiii» and 
suffers him to take a desaltc»y oouisey man^ % time 
lingering where the air is rich and the leafy growth 
luxuriant^ and rarely pressing on with the self- 
restraint of a single purpose. Especially noteworthy 
are the various ways of concluding a nanratiTe or of 
dealing with the mass of emotion which the dimaz 
of a great action arouses. Two modes of accom- 
plishing this are equally Bomantic, and equally 
opposed; a third, which i& peculiarly classic, is un- 
like both. The Romantic of the diffuse type is apt 
to treat the climax without special distinction, to 
develop unessential consequences with superfluous 
detail, and so to winnow away the excitement into 
indifference. The Romantic of the intense type 
again will hasten on to the dose, and strip away 
with fiejy impatience all but the bare indispensable 
firamework of the structure. Witness the most ef- 
fective dose of Shelley's Cenci: where the climax is 
only felt to be complete when the final exit startles 
away any lingering expectation that the innocent 
will still be saved. On the other hand, the pure 
classic ideal of art, severely excluding weak effects, 
yet exacting at the same time the utmost continuity 
and completeness, rounds off the climax with touches 
of paler but h.'%rmonious colour. Perfect examples 
of this are found in some of the longer poems of 
Mr Matthew Amdd. There is no dissolution of the 



^ 16, 17.] B09CANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 47 

climax in Sohrab and RuHum: the situation of the 
supreme moment is not changed: and in the gather- 
ing night Rustum still watches, Sohrab still lies 
dead. Had the poem ended here, it would have had 
the abrupter effect which I have described. But 
then comes a picture of solemn and harmonious 
beauty, — the river Oxus rolling calmly along the 
lands towards the sea, — ^which, without obliterating 
the expression of the tragic picture which preceded, 
invests its stem outlines with a tender opalescence of 
gentler sentiment. Mor when Empedocles has leapt 
into the crater does any god or man appear 
to alter or to moralise his doom: only a brief lyric 
song rises up from the woods of Aetna far down, 
and then turning away from the fiery eruption, calls 
up the thought of Helicon with its sleeping birds 
land beasts, and Apollo and the Nine glistening 
i through the balmy night. In both cases that which 
succeeds the climax does not attempt to continue it, 
but falls at once into an undertone of subordinate 
harmony, softening without effacing the effect. 

§ 17. To consider /now the tncoherence of lyric 
expression,— the Biszchen unvemUnftiges of Goethe's 
phrase. By this I only mean, as I conceive that he 
only meant, a tenuity, an impalpable fineness in the 
associations which guide the transitions, not the 
absence of such associations: a revolt from the laws 
of the understanding which is compatible with full 
allegiance to those of imagination. Abrupt expres- 



18 EasBsnujs cmsLkcnaamca or the [ch. it. 

sum of ibis sort might be oompared with a broken 
bridge which checks the passage of the creeping 
thing but does not «taj the binL For illostration 
I shall in the fint place refer to an infloence which, 
contemporaneons only with the hrifovM of Roman* 
ticism and bj no meani conflaent throogh its whole 
range with Bomantic tendencies, deserves to be intro* 
ducedy Bs a notable scarce and stimulus of imagina- 
tive intensity. It is a commonplace remark that 
the poetry of that era displays a new interest in 
external nature. What is more important to ob* 
serve is that a change in the conception of nature 
accompanies the changed attitude towards it. It is 
not merely that nature receives a reverence veiy 
different from the qualified admiration of the Au- 
gustans, but that the whole form and body of it is as 
it were transfigured: — ^informed with the analogue 
more or less literal, of the force, the passion, the 
intense life of man. In hct this was the poetic side 
of a more widespread revolution. The teleological 
idea was yielding, if not yet to that of evolution itself, 
at least to conceptions well fitted to prepare the way 
for it. The thought of an inert matter modified 
from without was passing into that of an organism 
moulded firom within. The spontaneity of vegetable 
and animal growth, anomalous on the one plan, 
became typical in the other. life pervades all 
things: the inanimate seems impossible: rest is but 
the outer garb of internal activity; sleep the vesture 






§ 17.] BOXANnC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 



49 



of dreams, death the gate to a life freed from the 
limitations of individuality \ The motive is the same 
whether it appear in the guise of Shelley's ma- 
terialism or of Wordsworth's pantheism. 

It is clear that a conception such as this could 
not remain without effect upon a poetry so deeply 
implicated in the aspiration after Nature^ and so 
largely composed of descriptions of it A vivified 
nature suggested, if it did not involve, a corresponding 
vivification of language. When Paulina is found to 
live and breathe, she can no longer be spoken of in 
the terms suitable to a beautiful but inanimate 
statue. AU those words then which have grown so 
vague tliat they no longer call up a vivid picture U} 
the imagination but only serve as the imperfect 
symbols of mental algebra, — words which the classi- 
cal poet employs complacently enough to portray 
a world which to him is scarcely more living than 
they — ^it shuns as the shadow of death upon a poetry 
which before all things exults and revels in its life ; 
in which every word must light up the mind with 
a sudden radiance, or thrill it with reverberations. 
This vividness may however have many degrees. A 
word may suggest an image which is more vivid 
than the prosaic word merely because more rare, or 
it may have the higher expressiveness which belongs 
to the description of a conventionally lower in terms 



> Cf. SbeUej't Adonah. 



H* 



50 ES8XKTIAL CBABACIKBlBnCB OF THS [CB. IV. 

of a higher phase of foroe: when for instance, in that 
profound negation of the absolutely inanimate of 
which I have spoken, the idea of the motionless and 
inanimate is instinctively enriched with the thought 
of hidden pulsation, when the least hint of force is 
transmuted into a conception of arrowy svriftness and 
vigour*, when any suggestion of motion grows at 
once into a picture of vehement life. 

Take again some of the ever-recurring metaphon 
of the simpler kind ; those for example to which is 
diiefly due the mannerism that clings to Shdley's 
style. The winds are often Mim,* the wings of 
spirits * winnow * the crimson dawn, curses tall 
' Hake by flake/ the eagle is 'entangled in the whirl- 
wind.* That highly Shelleyan line which closes the 
third Act of the Prometheus 



•c 



dim in the interne iunB** 



is also in various respects highly Bomantia Almost 
every word pierces instantly to the imagination; 
scarcely one would have been used in such a sense 
by a classical writer. The entire conception would 
have been alien to his celestial architecture; the word 

^ (Of esrth). «*iji& pulsM in the stony Teine.** 

BliOlBj, Pram. UmbamuL 
•<XLe ermwling ^buaen cot me with the epeare 
Of their moon-fineezing djstaU.** 

A. 



T , 






§17.] 



BOMANTIO AND GLASSIOAL 8TTLES. 



51 



dim, though iovolving no such subtle conception, has 
a certain association of mystery which belongs to no 
other word ; and the idea 'intense^' is in a startling 
manner combined with the notion of inane/ What 
could be more remote from the negative conception of 
space natural to a convcDtlonal poetry, as the bare 
residue which survives the abstraction of all the most 
vital qualities of reality, than this epithet suggesting 
however remotely a universe in which there is no 
part that is not pulsing with life? 

It is the more extravagant use of metaphor, 
especially, which produces the * touch of irrationality/ 
the incoherence in the eyes of perfectly sane and 
prosaic reason, to which I have alluded. Even to 
put one thing for another, which is the character of 
all metaphor, to substitute for the literal picture of 
an object an image of somowhing else more or less 
unlike it without hint or notice, is a procedure 
foreign to the wholly rational genius of prose. 
Simile, on the other hand, which does not substitute 
but compares, is certainly a more prosaic figure. 
Again, the breach of continuity involved in the 
single metaphor may be rox>eated where several are 
combined : a number of images flash upon the poet 
in succession ; each is fixed upon the canvas with a 
rapid dash of the bnish, and the effect is vivid and 
highly impressive to the imagination: but the 
transitions are abrupt and there is a want of light 

> Of. Mr Mfitthew Arnold*! Bunilar lue :« 

"In tiie intenie elear ttar-iown vaalt of heaven.'* 

4—2 



iiiit^ji m it HM iP* mni» 



■l<i»»M 



tmmmmmmm 



rtmm 



52 WaSESTUJs CSABACnOUBIICB or TBE [CH, IT. 

jumI ahadai Take nMoong ecmnUea ezamplet this 
ttanxa of the Adonaia (32): 

•«A pud-liktt qpiiU tamtifUl Mia ral^ 
A lorn fm deflation nwilnwl, a pom 
Girt round with weaknea: il out mmm vplift 
The lid^ of the saperineaiiiheiit hour. 
II ie a djwg leaf^ — * lalliiig diover — 
A hMAkiiig hQiow; even whilst w wpmk 
If it not htokenr" 

Again, ordinary language appropriates, with often 
arbitrary taste, certain feelings to certain terms, and 
for the most part to such as are little capable of 
expressing them ivith subtlety. Every movement 
then involving a richer phase of the feeling creates, 
in the effort at expression, a disturbance in the 
meaning of the terms; it reaches out on all sides 
and usurps the vocabulary of kindred feelings. Music 
appropriates colour and light and shade, it can be 
picturesque and sculpturesque ; while painting in its 
turn adopts tone and harmony from music A 
similar process, but carried far beyond the boldest 
affectations of art^KX>teries, marks the Romuitic 
effort to utter the new intensity of feeling which 
belongs to the era. The intoxication of music, espe- 
cially, which poor inarticulate Caleb Garth could 
express no better than by a nervous scraping of his 
stick upon the floor, and which even cultivated Ian- 
guage renders so feebly, breaks out in this poetry 
into the boldest and most luxuriant imagery. To 
Siielley the spirits appear 'wrapped in sweet sounds 



,, t i^C^3LJ 



m»«mmmi0mmmAmmmim)imm^^mmmm 



§ 18.] BOXAHTIO AND CLASSICAL STTLEa 



53 



as in bright yells/ to Keato delicious symphoDies 
bud and swellt and blow 'like aiiy fiowen;' and in 
the melody of the carillon Victor Hugo hears a 
gay spirit descending ' v6tue en danseuse espagnole/ 
a frail stair of invisible crystal Thus the conception 
of a nature instinct with life led to modes of expres- 
sion as unconventional, and hence within certain 
limits as Romantic^ as that conception itself. From 
another point of view — ^its close association with reli* 
gious faiths^ — a different conception of nature is 
doubtless more Romantic : that in which 

*' There*! nol the miaUett orb which thou beholdest 
Bat in hit motion Uha an angel singe 
BtiU quiring to the Toong-eTod diembim.*' 

Shelley's universe, informed with the impulsiveness 
of man, and Shakspere's, animated by his religion 
and power of song, are equally unconventional Both 
are unlike the Kosmos of .Pope, blindly obedient to 
a law imposed from without, and subject to a unity 
comprehensive enough to include as mere varieties 
of progress all the apparent aber.ations of human 
will With him reason guides the whole, as with 
them impulse or inspiration' every part: and what 
eacU discerns as the guidin]^ principle of nature, he 
honjurs as the sovran prerogative in man : Pope, — 
harmony, order, art; Shelley, the impetuosity of 
natural genius. 

§ 18. This contrast suggests a brief discussion 
of two poets whose day fell midway between these 



mm 



mmt 



r?^^^w 



54 ESSBMTIAL GHAaACTERISnca OF THS* [CH, lY. 

two ettremes, and whose style luxoidiiigly displays 
the complexi^ of a transition, at onee suffused with 
the receding and tinged with the rising light The 
poems of Gray and Collins unite the exquidteness 
and xefinement of the classical genius at its best with 
something of the trae Romantic abandcn^ and more 
which is no bad imitation of it. In general Gray 
stands nearer in cast of genius to the school which 
preceded him ; he is colder and more antiquarian ; 
his happiest turns are often the result of research, 
and if they have not also the air of research it is 
because Gray's art was largely of that kind which 
does not betray itselt Collins, on the other hand, a 
man of feminine reserve rare in that age of worldly 
poets, had more of passion and of mysticism, with 
something of the obscurity and the extravagance of 
a genius that rushes too fast and wanders too far. 
The tastes of both had a decided affinity to the wide 
literary sympathies of the Romantic movement: 
Collins, like Victor Hugo, like Ch>ethe, had his 
oriental edogues, and shows the mystic vein of 
Romance in his ode on tbe superstitions of Scotland^; 
and Gray, who for hts multifarious pursuits in 
science and literature might be called the more 
prosaic Goethe of a more prosaic society, wrote 
odes 'from the Norse' with the same hand which 
indited odes after Pindar 

Especially do they invite comparison in their use 

* It ift duimcterlstio of bit sge that he atfll c«2/« them niper* 
skitioiis. 



x.i'iir.i.it 



Ol llMi 



. § 18.] BOMANnC AND CLASSICAL STTLES. 



S5 



of PcnonificatioQ. Both are somewhat prone to 
throw about the abstractions in which tbey think 
there is a factitious semblance of humanity. Both, 
beside their formal odes to Liberty, Mercy, Adversity, 
&a — abound in minor instances of this transforma- 
tion. But Gray too often uses in the process only 
the simple devices of a capital letter and a personal 
pronoun, faintly coloured by some simple and obvious 
attribute. The 'sweeping whirlwind/ * fierce war* 
and * faithful love,' * Truth severe by fiBury Fiction 
drest,' — 'cares* that are 'sullen' and Passions that 
are ' frantic,' — such is (or the most part the rather 
fioM^itious personification of Qray. Collins, though 
with the same devotion to the world of abstractions, 
endows them with more reality and draws them 
with a more subtle fancy* His Spring ' with dewy 
fingers cold' falls indeed short of the Romantic 
boldness of BlakeV 



- ^^*0 Thoo with dewj looks, who lookest down 
Through the eksar windowi of the momiiig, torn 
Thine angel ejet open oor weetem isle 
Which in full ehoir hails tl^ approaoh, Spring/* 

eH%*< ^B • 

Nor have the PasnoM quite the picturesque 
gloyr .of Spt^nser: they have however a refined 
delicacy of imagination which neither Spenser nor 
Blake so unfailingly exhibits, and at least a rela- 
tive brilliance amid the somewhat sober hues of 
eighteenth century poetry. 

Personification is natural to the loftier lyric 



HJ|u Bi iup I II !■ i mm^Hmmm 



m*^ 






56 WSSBmAL GHABACRBSmCS^ Ac. [CH. IV. 

poetry of all tunea^ impelled to combine liigh and 
abstract thought with vvnd, concrete form. In 
Gbay and CSoUins it is partly due to the infla^ice of 
Pindar, partly to that of Spenan; the ooiyphaena of 
EnglJBh allegory. In either case it must be regarded 
as rather a Romantic than a classical characteristic. 
It has an unreality foreign to the transparency of 
meaning and reluctance to employ a needless fiction, 
which are conspicuously classic Even PindarV 
style, with its rugged abruptness, its forced expres- 
sion, its startling surprises and sudden leaps through 
the universe of thought, must be called, in thus far 
— ^however strange it may seem — ^Romantic: and. 
whatever associations may connect peisonification 
with the classical methods of art are due chiefly to the 
fact that this^ like other products of a rich imagina- 
tive poetry, was adopted and consecrated by rhetoric; 
and having received that stamp of propriety became 
part of the recognized machinery even of conven* 
tional art In any case the classic poet, if he treated 
it at all, would adopt rather the style of Gray than 
that of Collins; he would use simple forms and pale 
colours such as present merely a fleeting suggestion 
of the life which is merely feigned, instead of raising 
a brilliant phantasmagoria of high-wrought allegory, 
which only emphasizes, by the seeming substantiality 
of these abstractions, the Romantic unreality of the 
whole. 



c 



CHAPTER V. 

STYLE AS FORKALLT AFFECTED (II) BT FAKCT. 

I 

§ 10. The poetry of Gray, in which the lyric 
quality is, as we have seen, impaired by something 
of coldness and something of research, may serve to 
lead us from the discussion of style as affected by 
stress of feeling to consider the more distinctly 
arbitrary combinations oi fancy. 

The manifold sources of poetic pleasure affect us 
through two avenues. Recognition and surprise — 
the familiar and the novel, the revival of an ac- 
customed delight, and the stirring of a new one,-— 
poetry may strike either of these chords, and it is 
one of its greatest charms to strike them together. 
There must be something strange in the familiar, 
something familiar in the strange. Mere fulfilment of 
expectation, too, has often the effect of familiarity, 
even when that which is expected is itself strange, 
and non-fulfilment has the effect of strangeness, 
even when that which surprises is familiar. Some 
of the finest effects of art arise from these com- 
binations, as when a familiar air occurs unexpect^ 
edly in the midst of strange music; or when a strain 
familiar in the past has been so long unexperienced 



-^i^lii^jiii 



MP 



fmmmmmmm 



mn 



fmmnimmr 



58 aSSBHTIAL GHARACTEBI8IKS OF THB [CB. Y. 



•8 to fan with some shock of novelty even vpon an 
ear pvepaied for it On the other hand, these two 
kindred fonna of atrangenem instead of confliotii^ 
maj coincide: an effect at once strange in itself «nd 
unexpected may inteimpt the fitmiliar and hafaituaL 
In such cases the result may he piquant or erode, 
stimulating or displeasing, according as the inter- 
ropted effect was still pleasing or were heoome trite. 
Truth and heauty, it is said, are the same: and it is 
trae, in so far as no beauty unrelated to what is most- 
permanent in life can have a permanent effect: but 
then the permanent must mean that which to the 
imaginative insight of the poet is such, and which 
even ho may not at all times equally discern. In 
this way the highest beauty has at once troth and 
strangeness: it gives the delight of recognition, but 
recognition which though immediate is unwonted 
and delight which is mingled with and enhanced 
by wonder. But if the highest art reconciles this 
opposition by blending the contrary effects, it is 
characteristic of the two types of arl before us to 
incline to a more or less exclusive use of one or the 
other. Each suffers the defect of its quality; in the 
one, strangeness is too little tempered by familiarity/ 
in the other, the familiar teo little qualified by 
novelty: and accordingly the originality of the Bo- 
mantic is sometimes crude, the correctness of the 
classic occasionally trite. 

The characteristic of fantastic expression is a 



§ 10.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 



59 



certain gratnitous and as it were sportive exercise of 
exuberant faculty. Naturally this may be suggested 
with every variety of force, from the delicate flavour 
of artificiality which pervades many of Shakspere's 
sonnets to the repelling extravagance of the so- 
called Fantastic or Metaphysical school of the 17th 
century. 

Of a quality so familiar in literature a single 
instance, for illustration, will suffice: — 

"When fotty winteis ihaU besiege Ihy brow 
And dig deep tvDneheB in thy beauty's field,** 

is a fair example (out of a thousand) of the fancy of 
Shakspere at its normal level, — ^neither hard nor 
extravagant, and with a touch of beauty as well 
as quaininess; and it has that air of an inspiration 
easily provoked to adventure and slow to return 
from it which becomes so well the age of Eldorado 
enterprise. 

It is more worthy of remark that this quality 
is, in a limited form, no less conspicuous in the 
« Augustan poetry. In the PtutordU of Pope, for 
I instance,-— a work fairly typical of the less classical 
; side of classicism*— the description of nature is of a 
I thoroughly fantastic kind. Not merely that it is 
' informed with human features: but that they are the 
features of an artificial type of humanity. This is 
the distinction between what may be called imagina- 
tive and fanciful mythology. The former is the 
genuine mythology of a people still in the naive 



J. 



do BSSMTUL GHABACmnnGS OP THB [CH. Y. 

Stage of growth: and the fonm inth which it peoples 
mountain and wood are, like itself, not fiur lemoved 
from the spontaneous and nnieflectiYe life of natare 
which suggested them at fint^ and which remaixis 
when they Vanish. The fonns of an artificial age, on 
the contrary, are really more remote from those of 
naive humanity than these from the life of flowers 
and trees. The favourite metaphor for colour — €,g. 
'blushing* — sugge^ forcibly the atmosphere of 
dvUiaed society. We meet with 'blushing flowers,* 
and 'blushing berries';' and 'blushing Flora paints 
the enamel'd ground V ,The last line suggests the 
equally characteristic use of processes of art The 
reflected woods ' paint the waves * with green : when 
Alexis 'views his face' in the spring the rising 
blushes 'paint the wat'ry glass :' and bright flowers 
and buds when they do not 'blush* rarely fail to 
wear 'dyes.* So again the larks when thev* Meave 
their little lives in air' are busy 'preparing their 
notes.' Theirs is not the 'unpremeditated art' of 
Shelley's Skylark^ a poem in which what I have 
called the mythology, though abundant, is of the 
imaginative not the fantastic kind: the human 
qualities with which it glorifies the small brown crea- 
ture carry no discordant suggestions of civilisation. 

* Windior Forett^ 38. 

* It is interesting to obsenre that mnsie has associations distinctly 
more in accord witi^ nature than those of painting. This seems to 
be partly becaose as a matter of history its invention belongs to 
a more primitive epoch: partly because painting, being primarily 
imitative, is more decidedly artificial than muaio, which originated 
in the spontaneoos otteranoes of feeling. 



mmm 



.l>^*C*^Vpwii iw ■ a t mmXmitmtmi^mmiimmgwmmmrmmmmM 



§19.] 



BOKANTIO AHD CLASSICAL STYLES. 



61 



What is the explanation of this feature of Au« 
gustan classicism! For it must be admitted that the 
arbitrary as such is no part of serious classic art, 
violating as it does the continuity and order which 
are of its esseuce. But it is rare for any actual 
movement to exhibit in their purity the principles 
which the historian perceives on the whole to domi- 
nate it The complexity of human nature confounds 
our hard lines of division : and various conditions 
of the Augustan age caused it to pursue in one 
region the same qualities which it rejected with 
scorn in another. And as this fact is of high 
importance for deamess, I shall here devote a para- 
graph to it 

I conceive these conditions to fall under two 
heads : first, the vigour of a certain form of passion, 
—hatred, — secondly, the literal imitation of certain 
foreign models. The latter seriously influenced their 
conception of the theoretical requirements of classical 
art : the former often caused them to be violated in 
practice. Let an Augustan describe men — men as 
he knows them, moving in the artificial society in 
which he sees them move, hating one another with 
the hate of jealous authors, of rival place hunters, of 
Whig and Tory: men capable of the bitterness of 
Pope towards Addison or of Lady Mary Wortley 
Montagu towards Pope :— *men, in a word, of the age 
of the Dunciad and of Ovlliver^s Travels: he will 
display a descriptive boldness not less than that with 



.f^mmmmmmm 



:? 

r 



62 BSSKHTIAL CHABACrERISTICB OP THK [CH. V. 

which the Bonuaitic poet threads the subileet kby- 
rinths of his imagiiiatioii. It is needless to illustrste 
in detail; a fewof Pope*s portndts ftom the Dundad, 
EpUUe to Arbnihnot and SatireB would suffice. On 
the other hand, the purity of Augustan classicism 
was impaired by a blind imitation which, instead of 
translating Greek modes of thought into modem, 
inlaid them as it were unaltered in the alien mass. 
And so their style receded from Hellenism in pro- 
portion as their language ^ approached it. It was a 
habit borrowed firom the similar pseudo-classicism of 
France. Nature, which to the Teutonic peoples — at 
le^t to the literaiy portions of them— had long cast 
off the rude and mysterious robe which Teutonic 
imagination had cast about her, could not now 
assume the alien radiance with which she had ap- 
peared in Greece ; and to import these Dianas and 
Floras and river-gods and wood-nymphs into the 
sober landscape of England was as unclassical. in 
spirit as it was Greek in form. And then these men 
had no more sympathy with the forms which they so 
continually used than for the simplicity of nature 
which they used them to replace. Unclassical how- 
ever as this practice was, it became habitual, until 
the movement towards nature, of which Thomson 
and Goldsmith and Cowper caught in some degree 
the coming dawn, bringing, as wc have seen, both 
Romantic and classical influences in its train, swept 
away with one hand this pseudo-Hellenism, while 

' QUEEN? COLLhti- : 

LlbHAhV 



§ 20.] BOSCAimC AND CJ-ASSICil. ilTn.ES. 63 

with the other it indirectly fostered that eager adop- 
tion in art of all the various material of nature, 
which was a prime canon of Romantic doctrine and 
practice. F8eudo>Helleni8m was oouTentional, it was 
iGwhionable; but though classic expression is always 
conventional, it is the permanent, not the transient, 
element of custom to which it must conform. 

§ 20. Finally, to illustrate the action of this 
principle in that higher region of style,— general 
construction,— OS it affects the proportion and the 
continuity of the parts. We shall find that it is 
here the continuity which is chiefly affected. I will * 
select three characteristics. 

First, the association of grave and gay. This 
fantastic combination of the serious and comic must 
be distinguished from that Shaksperean quality 
which Schiller described as "the coldness that 
permits him to joke in the midst of the deepest 
tragedy." Both are Romantic, inasmuch as the effect 
of both depends chiefly on conttast: but in the 
former the end is merely the surprise, in the latter, 
SchUler notwithstanding, the tragic element derived 
an enhanced and unique intensity fiom the tmnsient 
intervention of the comic The one might be com- 
pared to the alternate shower and sunshine of aii 
April day; the other to the effect sometimes wit- 
nessed when in twilight a brief ray of moonlight 
makes more ghastly the gloom of a thunderatorm. 
Such is the difference between the easy mingling of 



64 B88EMTUL CHABICTBKIRICS OP THS [CH. ▼. 

these elMnenU in Benrjf IV ^ Comedy ofBrrm% the 
Tempett, A$ you Like U^ or the Winier^e Takp and 
that sterner end sabtler genius which sets off with 
clownish jests the real pathos, tooched with art^ of 
Cleopatra's end, or relieves the madness of Lear 
with the more refined and exquisite jesting of his 
FooL A second characteristic is that air of unreality 
in the whoie circumstances, which is given by the 
association of different times and countries : as when 
the bold weavers of Elixabethan England are tor-^ 
mented by mediaeval £iiries and make amusement 
for a king of mythic Athens^or when English squires 
and knights royster in the country-houses of Illyria ; 
or again where not merely history or geography but 
general probability suffers playful violence, die whole 
conception being pointedly fantastic and unreal, as 
in the forest encounters of the lords of Navarre 
and the ladies of France, or of the shepherd and 
courtier lovers among the tongued trees of the 
Ardennes. Thirdly, the same arbitrariness appears 
in particular incidents; e.g. the frequency of dis* 
guised figures such as the Bellanio of Beaumont and 
Fletcher, or the Violas, Rosalinds, Celias, Imogens, 
Portias, the Dromios and Antipholus\ who figure in 
the (for the most part earlier*) dramas of Shakspere ; 

1 Of eeone not forgetting that the pernliar plot of this play hat 
the aathority of Plautoa and of Menander: we are however 
too fainiliar bj thia time with the paradozee of the subject to 
sappoee that Greek and Classic are eqaivalent tenns. 

> CymhrUae is probably among the later: it is placed by 
Prof. Ward 31th in the list (Hut. of Eng. Drama^ i. 435). 



1— wwwiwi m' II ttKgmmmmmmmmmmmmmmtam^^KmmmmmmmimmmKmmm 




§ 20.] BOSfANTIC JlHD CLASSICAL aTTLES. 



65 



^ 



instnimcnts whence the poet blows as it wore a 
brilliant babble of illusion which at the climax bursts 
and disappears.. Or again, though involving no 
mistaken identity the incident itself majr have a 
fantastic air : the story of the caskets of 'Portia for 
example breaks like a breath from the Arabian 
Nights upon the more sober atmosphere of com- 
mercial V6nice\ To a yet airier region belong the 
hallucinations due to supernatural influence, of which 
the typical and immortal instrument is Puck, the 
At0 of Komantic comedy as the witches in Macbeth 
are the Ate of Romantic Tragedy. This touches one 
of the points in which the classic and the Romantic 
drama are brought very close. Without refining too 
far, or denying that the conception of aberration 
from and that of reconciliation with law are proper 
to all tragedy whatever, we may assert that the 
former is the more characteristic of Romantic, the 
latter of classical feeling. The property of making 
men err by distorting their vision, common to so 
many mythical figures, to the Qreek Ato, to the 
Teutonic Puck, and to the Jewish and Christian 
Satan,— was most conformable to the genius of Ro- 
mantic art, though easily absorbed by classicism. 
That reconciliation to law on the other hand, that 
retracing of the devious path, which is most charac- 
teristic of classicism, also intervenes to terminate the 

^ As a fDAtter of fact both the minor and the major aigameni 
of this plaj, ai oi many othera* appear to have aa Eaatem origiiu 



Bpl 






^•mmmim 






66 






most daring nguiai of Bomftntic inddenti wlietlier 
it appear in the leaaaertion of the noial law against 
Macbeth, or in the retam to their right minds which 
the 'nauf^ty spirit^' duded» finally accomplishes in 
his d^uded loveni 



, 



I 






i 



CHAPTER VI. 

STTLB AS FOKMALLT AFFECTED (ni) BT SENSE OF 

linrsTEBT. 

COKCLUSIOK. 

§ 21. *'I do not compare myself in point of 
imagination with Wordsworth^ said Walter Scott, far 

from it. But I can see as many castles in the 

clouds as any man, as many genii in the curling 
smoke of a steam engine, as perfect a Persepolis in 
the embers of a sea-coal fire." These phrases, — 
hardly just perhaps to the realistic side of Scott's 
imagination, — suggest an approach of the fantastic 
to the mysterious, which may help us in making the 
same transition. In both, the immediate sensuous 
appearance is transcended: but the fantastic is 
opposed to it as an arbitrary aberration to a primary 
realitj : while mystery implies that that which im* 
mediately appears is felt to be in some sort less real 
than what is dimly imagined The one is a conscious 
creation and erokes a poetic delight : the other is 
believed to be an intuition, and arouses a religious 
awe. Hence a difference in treatment The poet 



•■iil Uij l MipT i u^l 1 — » ■ n iiw^. Y'Ti » l i r il TTirr ; 



m¥*m 



>IIWII| 1 * 



08 'MMf MTf 41. ffff A ^ A ff TIHffl ffi ril OP THK fCH* TL 



J 



ftedy lepreflents tbe objeete of hit haej, Bjpmog no 
wealth of colour^ no industrj of pendl : but whore 
tbe imagined object is felt to be mysterioos, he 
shrinks from graphic portraitnre and substitutes 
ubecore hints. He confines himself more to the 
immediate preseutation, dwells upon the more signi- 
ficant parts of it^ repeats them with emphasis or 
points to them us it were silently and leaves them. 
Kence a profound and dominating sense of mystery 
gives a new importance to parts otherwise wholly 

subordinate. It is obvious that we have here under 

* 

a new form and arising from a quite diFerent source, 
that peculiarly Romantic tendency to exaggeration 
of the part which we have already twice encountered. 
As before an artistic love of contrast^ or a devo- 
tion to the variety of nature, drew the part out of 
subordination to the wbole^ so here the sense that 
each is implicated in something not itself, gives it a 
like undue predominance. 

A brief illustration of one phase ol this effect 
may suffice. Take these lines of ChrUiubd. m 

'«I8 the nl^t t\SS^ and ilr«kr t 

The nislil is ehilly, bat sol duk. 
Tbe tbin tpej elond is m^anA on high. 
It eoTcn bot not bidee tbe sky: 
Tbe moon is bebind, and at tbe fiiU: 

And jut ahe lodka botb snaD and dnlL |^| ' ) 

Tbe nigbt la cbill, tbe elond la gRgr." ' 

The very iteration of these simple phrases about I 

the dull night and the grey doud has the mysterious 



■ 



^ 



ft 



§ 22.] KOMANTIO AND CLASHICAX. STTLES. 



69 



I 



•5 



effect which in music is sometimes obtained by the 
slow repetition of a single note. Merely to dwell 
upon what seems simple forces the doubt that all is 
not so simple as it seems: and with this doubt comes 
conjecture, and with unsatisfied conjecture^ wonder 
and awe. 

§ 22. We have now irfk^kd through the proposed (^ 
range the main characteristics of Romantic and 
Classical style. It has been for the most part a 
record of deviations from a type of expression which 
is formally adequate without being redundant, and, 
in the larger sense of style, from a ty{>e of coustnic- 
tion in which there is at once proportion and cun- 
tinuiiy. On the other hand, in respect to the choice 
of ideas, we had to recognise another side of the 
contrast, the deviation from the range of conceptions 
permitted by a nalrrow aesthetic and a severe in- 
tellectual ideal The two sides of the opposition are, 
doubtless, as I have indicated in the first chapter, 
connected by no essential link: perfection of the 
formal elements of style is quite compatible with the 
catholicity of taste which proceeds from extended 
culture. The form which civilisation demands may 
still be imposed on ideas which a:«3 alien to it. A 
Hellenic art is possible without Hellenic contempt 
of the fidpfiapoi. Both sides of the contrast we have 
.seen influenced by the fundamental tendencies of 
Romanticism* We have found the idea of nature, 
whether bm a tendency or as a conscious principle. 



wl!m9iSKSSfiim 






■V^WM 



n4w*« 



70 UBUfUL GBABACRBI8TICB OV TBB [CB. YL 

ptodiiciiig a lealjsm offiMounYa to a nanow aesthetuv 
or intelleetoal taste; we haye foand on the other 
liand imperfection in form anting ttther fiom a love 
of arbitruineaa in art^ one phase of whidi is the 
proneness to excessive contrast.— or from -stress of 
feeling; or from absorption in the mysteriooa. .Some* 
times it is the iteration or the incomideteness of Ijrie 
expression, which produces disproportion; sometimes 
the abruptneaseSp the suxprisea; the startling con- 
trasts of fantastic oonstmction which break the 
contmuity. Nature, as an embodiment of endless 
▼ariety, art, as selecting the most striking insta:2ces 
of it. and exaggerating them, alike contribute to 
Bomantic effect Semantic poetry, to exert its full 
influence, must act on minds not yet trained to 
demard perfect proportion and continuity; it tells 
by the splendour and impressiveness of its ideas, 
rather than by thdr fitness; by the brilliance of 
single strokes, not by the harmony of their combina- 
tion. The Romantic has the power which creates, 
rather than that which restrains. His is not the 
curbing strength of the charioteer, but the impulsive 
and capricious energy of the horse. With the rebel- 
liousness, however, of ^'RtriOvfda, he combines the 
nobility of Bv/iOf. In the Bomantic the lamp of 
Power burrs with a brilliant and eager light : in the 
Classic its paler beam is mingled with the rays of 
the lamp of Sacrifice. And this lamp also never 
goes out in the chamber of the true artist Not that 






■*« 



• 






§ 22.] BOMANTIC AKD CLASSICAL STYLES. 7l 

in art, any more than in elides^ rightly understood, 
an absolute loss, a final surrender of good is asked or 
needed : in both only the undue exaltation of the 
part» of the individual, is foregone for the sake of the 
society, of the whole : what egoism is in ethics, dis- 
proportion is in art And so from another side we 
come round to the conception of that third stage in 
art in which the opposites are combined, and the 
exuberance of Romanticism is united with the aus* 
terity of Classicism. 

<« Mid Blraei^iag nifferen, hurt to cteath, ihe Ujrl 
Bhnddwrjag, tboj drew her gannenia off — and foand 
A robe of naekolotfi next the amooth white 



Suoh, poeta, ia Tour hride, the maael joong, gaj, 
Badiant, adom*d ontaide; a hidden gnaod 
Of thought and of Avaterity within." 



NOTE TO CHAPTER I. 

An exhaustive treatment of the subject of Koman- 
tioism would require an account of various developments 
of it which hardly fell within the scope of an essay 
professedly confined, like the present, to the sphere of 
literature, and English literature. It would be necessaiy, 
for nzample^ to describe with what sn uproar the wave 



mmmm 






mm 






' iMw m I 



mfrnffCf* 



n 



KOTS. 



wlueh liad proeeeded ham Gemany to in^mda Knghmil 
md ncBiiofl^lxokttaJaoiipaiiltdj. It voald be aeoesBuj 
to tnco tiio leflaxicii of iho litenij moTomeiit in tho 
m«k of Schnbot aiid Sehuinraii. ud in the pamting of 
Ovevbeck and Schodow. It would be necwwiy to ez« 
plidn the intimate relatioii in which thiB mestbetie moTo- 
mant stood with Bcbellinff s pbilosophj of Nature^— a 
leLition which resulted Lttoi.tho'pondld adTanee of a 
one-B&ded philosophical derelopment. of Kant and a one- 
sided literaxy deTelopment of Schiller, who was at the 
same time Kant's most eloquent ezpcment. But the 
romantic influence on art and on philosof^y was transient; 
and it would be neoessaiy, finaUj, to show how tho 
movement did in one sphere obtain an abiding though 
little recognised influence, bj immensely furthering the 
adoption of that historical point of view which has led 
to BO great a revolution in our conception of the past. 
Bat England, never fully mastered by the movementb of 
the ocmtinent, — ^half convert of the Benasoence, imper- 
fect diadple of. the Bevolution, absorbing slowly what 
attracts its somewhat limited sensibility, and rejectiug 
rather with the slight impatience of a satisfied curiosity 
than with any deep-seated revulsion of passion, — ^England 
felt litUe these wide-reaching ramifications of Boman- 
tidsm; or if she felt them, it was as single and separate 
movements which scarcely penetrsted deep enough to 
rouse the consciousness of their common origin. 



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