consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake. ROMANTICISM [Published in Macmillan's Magazine for November. It is better known as the Postscript to the volume of essays called Appreciations, published 1889, having been there reprinted. The essay remains the most penetrating and authoritative account of the use of the troublesome terms "classical" and "romantic" in criticism.] THE words "classical" and "romantic," although, like many other critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood them too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies in the history of art and literature. Used in an exaggerated sense, to express a greater opposition between those tendencies than really exists, they have at times tended to divide people of taste into opposite camps. But in that House Beautiful which the creative minds of all generations the artists and those who have treated life in the spirit of art are always building together, for the refreshment of the human spirit, these oppositions cease; and the Interpreter of the House Beautiful, the true æsthetic critic, uses these divisions only so far as they enable him to enter into the peculiarities of the objects with which he has to do. The term "classical," fixed, as it is, to a well-defined literature, and a well-defined group in art, is clear, indeed; but then it has often been used in a hard and merely scholastic sense by the praisers of what is old and accustomed, at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old, who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about it, - people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and Rome only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and tame. And as the term "classical" has been used in a too absolute, and therefore in a misleading sense, so the term "romantic" has been used much too vaguely, in various accidental senses. The sense in which Scott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this, that, in opposition to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange adventure, and sought it in the Middle Age. Much later, in a Yorkshire village, the spirit of romanticism bore a more really characteristic fruit in the work of a young girl, Emily Brontë, the romance of Wuthering Heights; the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, of Catherine Linton, and of Heathcliffe tearing open Catherine's grave, removing one side of her coffin, that he may really lie beside her in death figures so passionate, yet woven on a background of delicately beautiful moorland scenery, being typical examples of that spirit.... In Germany and France, within the last hundred years, the term has been used to describe a particular school of writers; and consequently, when Heine criticizes the "Romantic School" in Germany, that movement which culminated in Goethe's Goetz von Berlichingen, or when Théophile Gautier criticizes the romantic school in France, where, indeed, it bore its most characteristic fruits, and its play is hardly yet over,where by a certain audacity or bizarrerie of motive, united with faultless literary execution, it still shows itself in imaginative+ literature, they use the word with an exact sense of special artistic qualities indeed, but use it, nevertheless, with a limited application to the manifestation of those qualities at a particular period. But the romantic spirit is, in reality, an everpresent, an enduring principle, in the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought and style which that and other similar uses of the word "romantic" really indicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and widely working influ ence. Though the words "classical" and "romantic," then, have acquired an almost technical meaning, in application to certain developments of German and French taste, yet this is but one variation of an old opposition, which may be traced from the very beginning of the formation of European art and literature. From the first formation of anything like a standard of taste in these things, the restless curiosity of their more eager lovers necessarily made itself felt in the craving for new motives, new subjects of interest, new modifications of style. Hence the opposition between the classicists and romanticists - between the adherents, in the culture of beauty, of the principles of + liberty and authority respectively, — of strength and order, or what the Greeks called κοσμιότης. 1 ... The charm, therefore, of what is classical, in art or literature, is that of the well-known tale, to which we can nevertheless listen over and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of its artistic form is added the accidental, tranquil charm of familiarity. There are times, indeed, at which these charms fail to work on our spirits at all, because they fail to excite us. "Romanticism," says Stendhal, “is the art of presenting to people the literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs, are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their grandfathers." But then, beneath all changes of habits and beliefs, our love of that mere abstract proportion of music - which what is classical in literature possesses, still maintains itself in the best of us, and what pleased our grandparents may at least tranquillize us. The "classic" comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times, as the measure of what a long experience has shown will at least never displease us. And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in beauty, which they possess indeed in a preeminent degree, and which impresses some minds to the exclusion of everything else in them. It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed element in every artistic organization, it is the addition of curiosity to this desire of beauty that constitutes the romantic temper. Curiosity and the desire of beauty have each their place in art, as in all true criticism. When one's curiosity is deficient, when one is not eager enough for new impressions, and new pleasures, one is liable to value mere academical proprieties too highly, to be satisfied with worn-out or conven 1 Decorum. tional types, with the insipid ornament of Racine, or the prettiness of that later Greek sculpture which passed so long for true Hellenic work; to miss those places where the handiwork of nature, or of the artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulating products of art a mere irritation. And when one's curiosity is in excess, when it overbalances the desire of beauty, then one is liable to value in works of art what is inartistic in them, to be satisfied with what is exaggerated in art, with productions like some of those of the romantic school in Germany, not to distinguish jealously enough between what is admirably done and what is done not quite so well, in the writings - for instance of Jean Paul.1 And if I had to give instances of these defects, then I should say that Pope, in common with the age of literature to which he belonged, had too little curiosity, so that there is always a certain insipidity in the effect of his work, exquisite as it is; and, coming down to our own time, that Balzac had an excess of curiosity curiosity not duly tempered with the desire of beauty. But, however falsely those two tendencies may be opposed by critics, or exaggerated by artists themselves, they are tendencies really at work at all times in art, moulding it, with the balance sometimes a little on one side, sometimes a little on the other; generating, respectively, as the balance inclines on this side or on that, two principles, two traditions, in art, and in literature so far as it partakes of the spirit of art. If there is a great overbalance of curiosity, then, we have the grotesque in art; if the union of strangeness and beauty, under very difficult and complex conditions, be a successful one, then the resultant beauty is very exquisite, very attractive. With a passionate care for beauty, the romantic spirit refuses to have it unless the condition of strangeness be first fulfilled. Its desire is for a beauty born of unlikely elements, by a profound alchemy, by a difficult initiation, by the charm which wrings it even out of terrible things; and a trace of distortion, of the grotesque, may perhaps linger, as an additional element of expression, about its ultimate grace. Its eager, excited spirit will have strength, the grotesque, first of all, the trees shrieking as you tear off the leaves; for Jean Valjean, the long years of 1 Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825). ? In Hugo's Les Miserables. 2 convict life; for Redgauntlet,' the quicksands of Solway Moss; then, incorporate with this strangeness, and intensified by restraint, as much sweetness, as much beauty, as is compatible with that... The essential elements, then, of the romantic spirit are curiosity and the love of beauty; and it is only as an illustration of these qualities that it seeks the Middle Age, because, in the overcharged atmosphere of the Middle Age, there are unworked sources of romantic effect, of a strange beauty, to be won, by strong imagination, out of things unlikely or remote. In his book on Racine and Shakespeare, Stendhal argues that all good art was romantic in its day, and this is perhaps true in Stendhal's sense. That little treatise, full of "dry light" and fertile ideas, was published in the year 1823, and its object is to defend an entire independence and liberty in the choice and treatment of subject, both in art and literature, against those who upheld the exclusive authority of precedent. In pleading the cause of romanticism, therefore, it is the novelty, both of form and motive, in writings like the Hernani of Victor Hugo (which soon followed it, raising a storm of criticism) that he is chiefly concerned to justify. To be interesting and really stimulating, to keep us from yawning even, art and literature must follow the subtle movements of that nimbly shifting Time-Spirit, or Zeitgeist, understood by French not less than by German criticism, which is always modifying men's taste as it modifies their manners and their pleasures. This, he contends, is what all great workmen had always understood. Dante, Shakespeare, Molière, had exercised an absolute independence in their choice of subject and treatment. To turn always with that ever-changing spirit, yet to retain the flavour of what was admirably done in past generations, in the classics, as we say, is the problem of true romanticism. "Dante," he observes, "was preeminently the romantic poet. He adored Vergil, yet he wrote the Divine Comedy, with the episode of Ugolino, which is as unlike the Æneid as can possibly be. And those who obey the fundamental principle of romanticism, one by one become classical, and are joined to that ever increasing 1 In Scott's novel of the same name. |