FN 
 
 203 
 
 Hi 
 
THE 
 
 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 KOMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES,,: 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 BY 
 
 C. H. HERFORD, B.A. 
 
 TRINITY COLLEGE. 
 
 UlCim THE JiSSAT W/tlCIf OBTAINED THE MEMBERS' PHIZE, 187P. 
 
 Vif superha formud. 
 
 CAMBRIDGK: 
 
 DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO. 
 
 LONDON ; GEORGE BELL AND SONS. 
 
 82.0.*t 1880 
 
I MZH$ COLLFRF 
 
 LIgR.APY I 
 
TUE 
 
 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 KOMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 BY 
 
 C. H. HERFORD, B.A. 
 
 TRINITY COLLEOB. 
 
 BEING THE ESSAY WHICH OBTAINED THE MEMBERS' PRIZE, 1879. 
 
 Ft* tuperba formae. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE : 
 
 DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO. 
 
 LONDON : GEORGE BELL AND SONS. 
 
 1880 
 
(U-^'^i^&oo 
 
Reproduced by 
 DUOPAGE PROCESS 
 in the 
 U.S. of America 
 
 Micro Photo Division 
 Bell & Howell Company 
 Cleveland 12, Ohio 
 
 
 IQ' 
 
?2o 4 
 
 CBmlinb$c: 
 
 raiSTSD BY C *. CLAT. ILA. 
 AT TMK UHiVRkUTT MUUMl 
 
 7.'?A?S 
 
 I QUEENS COLLEGE 
 ; LIBRARY 
 
 j NEW YUr.A CITY 
 
 fr^Tftww 
 
 i 
 
TO 
 MY AUNT 
 
 MRS TITRNER 
 
 OF NOTTINOHAM 
 
 •-v. 
 
 fiiKpii oio^ fifyaXutw, 
 
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 claim to some degree of indulgence, that 
 it was composed in odd hours snatched from severer 
 work during the few months preceding a Tripos. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 « 
 
 PAOR 
 
 Chap. I. iNTKODtrcxoRY ; Clabsio and Romantio in 
 
 Genebal . . . . . . . . 1 
 
 II. Pbincifles of Style exemplified in Vebsb. 22 
 
 ni. Stile as materially affeoted : Bealibu . 29 
 
 rV. Sttlk as formally affected 
 
 (i) By Emotion 41 
 
 V. (ii) By Fancy . . . . » .57 
 
 VI. (iii) By Sense op Mystery. 
 
 Conclusion . . ... G7 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IN 
 GENERAL. 
 
 § 1, The symbolic nature of the words current 
 in the complexcr dej)artnicnts 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 famous 
 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 IGth and 17th 
 centuries 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 
 
2 }ESSENTIAL CEABACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. L 
 
 retains the faintest possible flavour of this sense as a 
 stock term of the guide-book and the advertisement. 
 The Romantic school of the beginning of this century 
 gave the term a more distinct reference to the past, 
 but the implication of any special period became 
 continually less exclusive 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 histery of the term Classic is scarcely simpler. 
 From its original reference to the first class of 
 Roman citizens, it was in late Latin transferred to 
 those whom, by a less definite metaphor, we too 
 entitle 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 
 Btili, when used absolutely, its commonest application. 
 Let us attempt to clear this indefiniteness. 
 
 § 2. We wUl, in the first place, notice an 
 especially confusing ambiguity in the usage of these 
 terms, Romantic and Classic. 
 
 They denote on the one hand two types of poetic 
 
 mind or of poetry, on the other, two movements 
 
 based upon the imitation or revival of these types. 
 
 In the same way the familiar contrast of Platonist 
 
 ^ Lttire* dLt BupuU et Cototut. 
 
§§ 1, 2.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 3 
 
 and Aristotelian may either refer to certain schools 
 of mediaeval logicians or Renaissance moralists who 
 consciously derived from the Greek thinkers their 
 method or their point of view ; or it may he applied, 
 as by Coleridge, to express a broad distinction in the 
 speculative attitude of men, of which the relation of 
 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 the two sets of associaticns typified by Plato 
 and the Platonisers, by the Attic and the Atticist, 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 
 susceptibiUty 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 Alterthilmeleit 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 
 
j4 BSSE3?TIAL CHAEACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. I. 
 
 and permanent in literature ; each to the other is a 
 narrow and provincial sect, a wave which stirred the 
 literary waters for a while, and then was lost. And 
 there is no douht that the hattle of 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 
 loftier Btand-pc»int, the former combatants look back, 
 and recall with a certain disgust the vain noise and 
 tumult, the personal rancour, the storms in the press, 
 the battles in the theatre. "Ainsi," said Victor Hugo, 
 **ces miserables mots, Ciassiciste et Romanticiste, 
 sont-iLs tomb^s dans Tabime de 1830, comme gluckiste 
 et picciniste daDs le gouffre de 1789. L'art seul 
 est restt?*. 
 
 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 without thoroughly entering, in the first 
 place, into their point of view. 
 
 § 3. Perhaps all violent movements are partly 
 
 * E.g. the conception of Classicism as involving strict obedience 
 to canons was certainly intensified by the emphatic scorn of them 
 expressed at first by the Romanticists. Cf. bte. Beuve ' Qu'est-ce 
 qu'un classique ?' Causeries du Lundi, iii. 
 
 * Preface to Marion Delomu. 
 
§§ 2, 3,] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 5 
 
 if 
 
 negative ; they 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 display 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 God, 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 superficially 
 applaud the course implicitly enjoined in that in- 
 dictment, at bottom only knew that they bated 
 conventional poetry, and conventional life; and 
 whatever was rare, poetic and unconventional, 
 whether in the Middle Ages or elsewhere, that they 
 
6 M5SENTIAL C?HARACTERISnCS OF THE [CH. I. 
 
 weire ready to glorify and to imitate. The Elisa- 
 bethan Age of England, too much imbued with the 
 E^nascence for naivete, too little for pedantry; the 
 contemporary drama of Spain, brilliant wiJi the 
 versatility of Lope and the catholic chivalry of 
 Calderon; the mediaeval epics of France and Ger- 
 many, — Lancelot and Renard, Roland and the Nibe- 
 lunsen; the straoo^er le^rend world of the Norsemen; 
 the mysterious figures of the Gadhelic legends, 
 represented as was then supposed in Ossian : the 
 mytholog} of the Greeks, familiar enough as a mine 
 for allegory and aUiisiou 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 Eaigland. Lessing had shewed his 
 countr} men the nobility of Homer and of Shakspere. 
 Goethe applied his piratic imagination to the con- 
 struction of West-Oestliche Divans or caught and 
 perpetuated the last breath of true chivalry in Gotz 
 von Berlichingen. Naturally influences so various, 
 whatever community of attraction underlay them, in- 
 duced considerable variety of literary style. Within 
 the rarge of lyric poetry, three distinct models 
 
§§ 3 — 5.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 7 
 
 produced as many schools : the stem simplicity of 
 the north, the melodious sweetness of the south, 
 the brilliant fancy 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 dignified 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 unito 
 them in convergence. All literatures except the 
 present, all styles except the conventional, seem in 
 favour : if nocture 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 the mdvement 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, an 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 then, it would seem, the art must be of a far 
 
i TBSSISSniL CHAILiCTERISnCS OF THB [CH. t 
 
 different genios : it iiiust be the art which beguiled 
 the seiises by variegation, not that which charms the 
 intellect by symmetry, the art which relieves the 
 monotony rather than the disorder of the world. 
 The Romantic poet, weary of the drab hues of the 
 age of understanding, turned 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 overcharged, 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 
 chaim of beauty than by its incidental unreality. 
 The wilfulness of defiance, now petulant now sportive, 
 mingles with the single mind of art. 
 
 An impoitant element of this tendency to the 
 arbitrary or fantastic is the love of contrast. 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 Romantic. This has 
 in fact been regarded as the very centre of the 
 ''ntagonism by one who, if not the leading poet of 
 the Romantic school of Germany, was certainly its 
 greatest critic and its most refined translator — 
 August WUhelm SchlegeL "The whole play of 
 vital motion" he says in the first lecture on the 
 Drama *' hinges on harmony and contrast. Why 
 
§§ 5, n.] ROIMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 9 
 
 then should not this phenomenon recuv on a grander 
 scale in the history of man ? In this idea we have 
 perhaps discovered the true key to the ancient and 
 modem history of poetry and the fine arts. Those 
 who adopted it gave to the peculiar spirit of modern 
 art, as contrasted with the antique or classical, the 
 name of JRomantid' 
 
 But though Schlegel lived to see the movement 
 which he had helped to guide in Germany 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. Hu 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. 
 
 § G. 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- 
 bolism : instead of resisting or forgetting, accept and 
 idealise it. A more spiritual side of the movement 
 
10 ESSENTIAL CRASACtEBISnCS OF THE [CH. I. 
 
 comes out bere ; with as cloee an affinity to religion, 
 as the former has to the sensuousness of art Poetry, 
 which (^n represent hoth, shews here marked traces 
 of the former, and the poetic fctciJty is assimilated to 
 the inspiration of the prophet, instead of to the skill 
 of the artist*. 
 
 It is easy to see how those dominated by this 
 sense of mystery should be especially attracted to the 
 religious and superstitious attitude of the naive mind, 
 and espeoially of the mediaeral mind. Hence Ro- 
 mantic poetry is as essentially mysterious as it is bright 
 and fantastic: the suggestiveaess and infinity of gloom 
 belong to it as much as the finiieness and complete- 
 ness of ct)loui\ The shadowy depths of the forest, 
 haunted with gnome and dwarf, the lonely mountain 
 in whose siJe Barbarossa has his palace, and where 
 his horses pant impatient for the night-hunt, these 
 belong to one side of the Romantic genius ; to the 
 other, the gay pageantry of chivalrous war and the 
 brilliant posing of Proven<jal love. 
 
 These two sides of the genius of Romance may 
 without excessive refinement be described as respec- 
 tively northern and southern. The Teutonic spirit 
 indeed enters into both, jubt as the Teutonic race was 
 largely mingled even with the races which spoke the 
 Romance tongues. But in the south, the bright- 
 
 ^ E,g, KovaliB considered that * der poetische Sinn mehr Yer- 
 irandschaft mit dem Sinne fill Weiasagong, mit dem religiosen, 
 dem Waim&iim bat.' 
 
§ 6.] ROMANTIC AND CLAI^ICAL STYLES. 11 
 
 ! 
 
 ness of nature inspired a sensuous and gaily-coloured 
 poetry and Arabian influence — to which the Trou- 
 badoui-s owed not a little — encouraged this tendency, 
 and stimulated 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 emotion, 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 o\ir sense as in the more special meaning of the 
 Greek ; the rites of summoning derxl spirits arc 
 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 Roman retained so fully as 
 the Teutonic peoples the genuine sentiment of the 
 mysterious. The Greek was too plastic, the Roman 
 too prosaic. The former embodied so vividly that 
 something which he felt informing the things ho 
 saw, that the impressiveness of the unknown forsook 
 it, and it assumed almost the familiarity of sense. 
 In the latter, on the other hand, the intuition of the 
 
12 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. I. 
 
 anknown had so little persistence that he readily 
 dropped the whole scheme of thought which implied 
 it, and retained an Olympus of empty names, supplied, 
 by the ambition of political aspirants, with a ritual 
 no leP3 empty. Thus the fraiik imagination of 
 Greece, intolerant of the obscure, impatient of the 
 formless and the indistinct, tended almost as much 
 by assimilating the unknown as did the dull imagi- 
 nation of Rome by relinquishing it, to destroy the 
 mysterious. Only when the Teuton broke in upon 
 their decaying splendour and power, with his 
 persistent Jissertion 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 perfect 
 clearness and complete unconsciousness, at length 
 realised. Greece was like the radiance of midday, 
 which as with a bold chisel determines and completes 
 whatever is vague and incipient: Rome the total 
 darkness which excludes even the sucrfjestion of form : 
 while to the Middle A^es belong that hour of 
 dusk when every shape at once prompts wonder 
 and refuses to gratify it, a symbol and a veil, a 
 uniftn of inexhaustible suggestiveness and inexorable 
 limitation. 
 
 § 7. The ideals just characterised as the 
 fantastic and the mysterious comprise between them 
 a large part of what is strictly Romantic. To aim 
 
§§ C, 7.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 13 
 
 at these qualities was to be unreservedly Romontic. 
 We have now to examine two movements which as a 
 ])art of the anti-classical reaction were leally more 
 important than these, and which though indifferent 
 or even hostile to E-omanticism 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 Romanticism — 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 Revolution, and the reaction which half 
 overcame its ebbing tide. To the men of the Revo- 
 lution nature and freedom were synonymous; it 
 was Rousseau, its prophet, who had cried that in 
 this corrupt and civilised world man, naturall}' free, 
 wa*? everywhere in chains. To the men of ihe 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- 
 
I^ ^SSE^TVa* CHABACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. L 
 
 questioned, always got the 1)etter of its questioaers. 
 Here however they had a common stand-point with 
 thc^e whom purely literary sympathies were drawing 
 that way. To revive the untrammelled realism of 
 the ages which preceded Malherbe, to write with free 
 obedience to impulse, to let nature create its own 
 art, to speak without restraint of things which a 
 simpler age was not yet so refined as to think un- 
 poetical — in all this the pursuit of nature in litera- 
 ture fell in with the reaction in politics. But on 
 another side it no less obviously fell in with the 
 Revolution, For what did this pursuit of nature 
 mean but a revolt from the canons which since the 
 17th century hail been observed in poetry, and 
 whose authority had seemed to grow with their age ? 
 From the double front which the literary move- 
 ment towards nature thus inevitably assumed, re- 
 sulted a similar diversity in the political and religious 
 attitude which its members adopted. All with some- 
 thing 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 leactionary noble like Chateaubriand or 
 a feudal chieftain like Scott: there a Wordsworth 
 or a Coleridge, opening their poetic careers with 
 glov^ing tributes to the levellers of Paris. Here the 
 
-§ 7.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 15 
 
 gift of poetry is asBimilated 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- 
 diaeval life ; there, Shelley is expelled from Oxford 
 for atheism, and refuses at the cost of a fortune to 
 recognise primogeniture. That mobility of political 
 principle which was not inconsistent with adherence 
 to artistic faith is especially seen in the history of 
 the French Romantic school. In the c^nacle of 
 1827, a^-dour 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 hands 
 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 practice did not likewise suffer 
 revolution : how Victor Hugo for example could be 
 no less a leader in Romantic }X)etry after Ste. Beuve 
 had converted him (as he claimed) to democraey, 
 than when still full of the new wine of the Restora- 
 tion : just as, conversely, Coleridge could 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 
 
16 ESSENTIAL CHAIULCTERISnCS OP THE [CJH. h 
 
 Higbgate hili** the coryphaeus in England of mystic 
 theology. 
 
 It will now be clearer what element the move- 
 ment towards Nature, thus complexly related to the 
 Komantic movement, contributed to it. It was the 
 variety of nature unchecked by an eclectic art ; the 
 profusion of forms and colours, of lights and shades, 
 miaistering in every way to the love of cor.trast : — 
 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 Romantic 
 poetry : that in one place there is nothing in nature, 
 however perfect, that it will not alter, in another 
 nothing, however monstrous, that it will not retain. 
 Fantastic art and natural realLm have both a share 
 in it ; it is at once ideal and reaL It accepts the 
 contrasts of nature, and where they are too dehcate 
 amplifies them by Jirt. 
 
 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 cjme, and higher suscepti- 
 bility to emotion naturally led to a higher estimation 
 of it. Eixthusiasm, depreciated by a Locke, a 
 Shaftesbury, a Hume, was now assimilated to in- 
 * Carljle'fl Life of Sterling, 
 
§ 8.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 17 
 
 spiration, and calm rationality to mechanical routine. 
 The age of 'force' and 'genius' was at hand, with 
 its Carlyks and Emersons, its exaggeration of the 
 power of the individual, its neglect of the inertia 
 of the race. Forcible individuality always tends to 
 an injClituation of self-confidence. From its first 
 na'ive 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 with the present in the image of an ideal 
 past 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. Tliey 
 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 }'Outli 
 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 \ 
 
 * Gervinus, Qesch. d. deutschen Litcratur. 
 H. 2 
 
18 ESSENTIAL CHAR/LCTERISTICS OF THK [CH. 1. 
 
 They lingered ove? the traditions of chivalry, when 
 the inspiration of the poet enforced the soldier's, 
 and the baron's feast was incomplete without the 
 niiastrers song. And naturally, as the ti.sk of 
 transforming the inveterate prose of the present 
 appeared more and more impossible, they assumed 
 with the more fixity a retrospective attitude. In a 
 word, the mediaevalism already prompted by Catholic 
 sentiment, and aversion to Aufklarung, was rein- 
 forced by the enthusiasm of poetry. 
 
 Ifc need hardly be ^xjint^jd out how other kinds 
 ahio of powerful sentiment, repelled by uncongenial 
 realities, sought refuge in the same direction; how 
 the story of Dante was cherished 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 chivahous love, which could worship a 
 name and search through Europe the owner of a 
 face on a locket, powerfully attracted men weary 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 ivith 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- 
 
§§ 8, '9.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. V.) 
 
 anc^gf passion, the sympathetic diffuseness of tlie 
 na'ive narrator and even the prolix enthusiasm of 
 the less inspired ballad-maker, now commend them- 
 selv4iSL-to the poet as precious qualities of poetry. 
 Sentiment, however obtrusive, is never coldly re- 
 ceived. The 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 
 llomanticism 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 
 impHcation, 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 unpnmed variety of nature the limita- 
 tions of an eclectic art : to passion glorified and 
 dwelt on, passion restrained and somev/hat dis- 
 paraged. Romanticism, on the other hand, n)akes 
 prominent the qualities conspicuous in the youth of 
 a nation ; bright aimless fancy, awe of the unknown, 
 eager uncritical delight in the abundance of nature ; 
 impetuous joy and sorrow, breaking forth into such 
 free and instant tears and smiles as the Aro-onauts 
 
 o 
 
 2—2 
 
20 esssnual chaeacteristics of the [ch. i. 
 
 uttered, oy the comrades of Odysseus. In Classicism 
 an age of understanding and refinement severely 
 asserts its rights : and excludes whatever cannot be 
 brought to its test ; all that is obscure, redundant or 
 defective, too prominent or too unobtrusive 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 exclusiveness tends with the growth of a more 
 catholic culture to diminish, while an enlarged 
 UDderstanding becomes capable of imposing a unity 
 not less complete but only more complex upon more 
 diverse matter. And thus the anta^ronism of the 
 two movements tends, as has been said, to dissolve, 
 the more permanent elements of each persisting, 
 while the more transitory drop out. The wide 
 outlook of Romanticism is accepted by a new gene- 
 ration which at the same time rejects its wilful 
 eccentricities. The nature, the passion, the mystery, 
 the grotesqueness and the repulsiveness which it 
 freely admitted are no longer ejected absolutely 
 from the palace 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.] ROMANTIC 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 school seized upon a fragment and ex- 
 aggerated its value : only when the fragments were 
 c^mbined in a higher synthesis could the complete 
 sphere of art be formed. 
 
22 XiSSENTIAL GHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. IL 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 ' PRINCIPUeS OF STYLE EXEMPLIFIED IN VERSE. 
 
 § 10. The structure of Verse may be regarded 
 as the most external and formal part of style. The 
 principles it involves are few and obvious, and its 
 character is for the most part stamped upon its face. 
 It will therefore be well to begin with a brief discus- 
 sion of Romantic and Classical verse, on which the 
 essential marks of the two styles are impressed in a 
 majiner 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 from 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 
 
§ 10.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 2.3 
 
 classicists of England. In one respect indeed this 
 measure is less characteristically classic than the 
 Alexandrine employed by those of France; inasmuch 
 as its five accents fall less easily into a perfectly 
 symmetrical line. This must in fact 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. 
 
 1 Pope's well known couplet about 'leather and prunella* 
 is one of the rare exceptions. 
 
24 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. H. 
 
 § 11. It is less easy to indiaite any single 
 rhjrthm which is exclusively or especially Romantic. 
 Aft deviation is more manifold than conformity, the 
 license of nature than the restraint of art, so the 
 Komantic genius revels in a thousand forms, where 
 the Classical perfects a few. We may however note 
 two principal classes of form which are characteristic 
 of it, Tlie impatience of the ordinary, of the light 
 and air of common day, which belongs to the Ro- 
 mantic genius, would lind expression in a verse which 
 either permitted, or by its very form involved, the 
 utmost variety of effect. The blank verse of the 
 Elisabethan, by its very 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 Provencals, 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 regard 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 i'rance 
 had influenced the literature of those countries, so 
 England in turn blended the artificial Romantic 
 
§11.] ROMANTIC AND 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 successors, even the author of Piers 
 Plowman, to overcome. Surrey and Wyatt natural- 
 ised the sonnet, and Spenser the ocirain, with a 
 characteristic addition of his own*. He also gave 
 brilliont 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 
 cou[>let {lb. Maije, February, Mother Hubbard's Tale), 
 seven-line stanza (Daphnaida), and more complicated 
 stanzas in the Prothalamium and Epithalaniium. 
 
 And the blending of these two types of verse 
 produced a tliird 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 rhythni, by the use of a verse in 
 which the former was normal, the latter habitual, so 
 that every use of it caused a piquant irreg\darity 
 which is essentially Romantic. 
 
 I have already noticed the changes which the 
 classical poets introduced into the rimed couplet ; 
 
 * The complex stanzas of Mlla and the Battle of Hastingt 
 (both versions) deserve mention by the side of Spenser's, ■who 
 doubtless suggested them. Chatterton was probably beguiled by 
 the afifecied archaism of Spenser into the use of stanzas as anachro- 
 D0U8 as his language. 
 
26 ESSENTIAL CEABACTZRISTICS OP THE [CH. IL 
 
 changes which gave to rime an eittirely different 
 artistic effect, sigmflcant of the new school of genius 
 it was to serve. For nothing can be more unlike in 
 effect than verse in which the sense runs freely on, 
 and that :n which a pause at the end of line o.* 
 couplet is habitual In the latter case the rime 
 coinciding with the divisions of the sense, only 
 accentuates its regularity: just as the recurring 
 strokes of the drum emphasise the regular march of 
 soldiers; in the former, the very symmetry 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 all the winds, wandering along the shore, 
 Undulate with the undulating tide." 
 
 In cases like this, the normal rhythm, running as 
 a bort of undertone in the imagination, sets off the 
 strangeness of the rhythm which meets the ear. 
 In prose, on the other hand, comparative irregularity 
 
 * EpipftfcMdion. Kndymion, Lamia, So.dfllo. Cf. too the variety 
 of movtments which Hugo and Musset introduce into the Alexan- 
 drine, Btiii retaining the rime. 
 
§ 11.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. ?7 
 
 of rhythm is normal, and has the effect of regularity. 
 Ellsabethan blank verse presents many other appli- 
 cations of this principle ; for example, the occasional 
 half-lines*, both within and at the end of a speech, 
 and the irregular metre of lines broken by a pause. 
 Of the fonner kind an example is— 
 
 "The miserable have no other medicine 
 But only hope : 
 I've hope io live, and am prepared to die." 
 
 Claiidio, in *^ Measure for Measure.'* 
 
 Of tlie latter, the famous passage in the same scene :— 
 "Than the soft myrtle; bat 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 irregidarity 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 I6cal habitation and a name... 
 
 The 16natic, the I6ver and the p6et... 
 
 And duty in his service perishing. . . 
 
 Make periods in the midst of sentences, &c..., 
 
 * Similarly it is essentially a Romantic trait to admire as fluch, 
 what Dr Newman calls ' the pathetic half-lines of Vergil.* Which 
 however the genius of classic art compels us to attribute merely 
 to the absence of correction. 
 
 * Lecture* on Shakeepere* 
 
28 ESSENTIAL CHAKACTERI8TICS OF THE [CH. U. 
 
 In Pope's bands the exquisite variety of this move- 
 ment was abandoned ; and the accents of bis normal 
 verse are both more numerous and more emphatic — 
 a natural consequence of the conciseness of epigram- 
 matic style. 
 
 Again, a still bolder variety may be obtained by 
 basing the rhythm on accents instead of syllables. 
 This, though certainly not of Romance origin, is 
 undoubtedly of Romantic effect; as Coleridge, who 
 introduced it (in Christahel)^ was the most genuinely 
 Romantic poet of the modem English School 
 
 Finally, the whole system by which the Elisa- 
 bethan dramatists mingled prose and verse, rime and 
 blank, epic and lyric, in the same play, is, to us at 
 any rate, E^>mantic. To them it doubtless had no 
 Euch forcer but was simply the natural procedure 
 which permits different sides of life to be represented 
 in language appropriate to them : but the modem 
 has been familiarised with a severer and less prodigal 
 ait, and to him this profusion of effects has a chann 
 more subtle and delicate than that of nature — 
 the charm of Romantic variety, irregularity and 
 contrast. 
 
§ 12.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 29 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 STYLE AS MATERIALLY AFFECTED. — REALISM. 
 
 § 12. Victor Hugo, in the famous preface to 
 Cromwell wliich served as the manifesco of the 
 French Romantic school, declared tliat the epic was 
 the jifculiarlj^ antique, the drama the characteristi- 
 cally motlern, form of art. The drama combines 
 all elements of life, — body and mind, sense and 
 intellect, grotesqucness 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 poetr}^ and sculpture to the similar though nar- 
 rower difference between descriptive poetry and 
 dramatic rei)resentation, 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 concurring cause, he also loved contrast. 
 
30 K3SKNTIAL CHABACTEKISTICS OF THE [CH. UI, 
 
 Both infiuences combiDed to make the drama the 
 most characteristic form of modem art Apart firom 
 differences of subject, the epics and the odes of 
 modem times are more or less consciously influenced 
 by antique models. Tasso, Dante, Milton, Klopstock 
 would have written otherwise without Homer and 
 Vergil: Cowley, Dryden, Collins, Gray, without 
 Pifidar: but the drama of Shakspere is in form as 
 iinhke, as it was probably independent of, that of 
 Sophocles. 
 
 To illustrate this 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 Romantic 
 poet both admits an idea more freely, and brings 
 it more vividly home to the imagination : the classic 
 will either exclude it altogether, or, admitting it, veil 
 its offensivenoss. Romanticism, elsewhere seeming 
 to slight reality, and to seek in gay flights of fancy, 
 full of surprises and improbabilities, an escape from 
 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.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 31 
 
 same. Nature combines the two ideals. Infinitely 
 various and comprehensive, she at the same time 
 moves with, ultimately, the utmost uniformity. 
 When the Romantic adopts nature as his cry, he 
 means 'its variety more than its regularity: and when 
 he seems to abandon it, it is only that an element 
 slightetK before is now excluded altogether. 
 
 This appears in many modes. Its condition is, 
 as I have implied, a certain transparency of style, 
 which'-atlmits with no softening disguise many things 
 which the conventional artist, from refinement, dig- 
 nity or sensitiveness avoids — the common, the na'ive, 
 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 fully 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 according 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 every line, graceful or deformed, and 
 
32 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. III. 
 
 almost organicallj responding to every motion. It 
 may be the mere admissi ^a of unconventional terms 
 — fiuch as the 'handkerchief* in Othello, which at its 
 first perfonnance before a Paris audience so violently 
 stirred the old Adam of Pseudo-classicism — or it 
 may be a colouring 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 he called the subtlety and minute- 
 ness of nature. For the most part I shall draw upon 
 the writings of the moilem Romantics — the instances 
 of all in the writings primarily Romantic — e.g. the 
 Eiisabethan drama — being suflBciently obvious. 
 
 § 13. A very few words will suffice to explain 
 the attitude of Augustan classicism towards the naive 
 and the arch.'iic. The era of ripe understanding* 
 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 
 classicLsm 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] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 33 
 
 of a mcdiaevalising 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 modern type^ 
 
 In the modem Romantic 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.g., it is very largely personal. 
 In Chatterton, whose great capacity for imaginative 
 sympathy with the past was united with no touch 
 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 modern 
 Romantic sentiment; and his arcliaism reflects his 
 own imaginative delight in the past of chivalry, of 
 Arthur, of Roland, however inappropriate to such 
 
 * It is tnie that Pope in describing the self-criticism of *thc 
 men who write such verse as we can read, ' bids them occasionally 
 **In downright charity revive the dead: 
 Mark where a bold expi'cssive phrase appears, 
 Bright with the rubbish of a hundred years ; 
 Command old words tJaat long have slept to wake, 
 Words that wise Bacon or brave Raleigh spake." 
 Bat he can hardly be said to have acted on the injunction. 
 
 ' A rustic nomenclature, wbiob Pope takes credit for not 
 imitating in his Paslorali, 
 
 n. 3 
 
34 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. IIL 
 
 an age may be the pajrticular kind and degree of 
 archaism which he assumed. And Spenser, like 
 ChattertoD^ often belies the simplicity of the age 
 whose language he affects by an ornate splendour 
 of imagery hardly known before the Renascence. 
 Keats, too, in his Eve of St Agties, and Isabella, con- 
 stantly suggests the tone of naive sympathy with 
 which Chaucer tells a pathetic story. How pointedly 
 unlike the calm dignity of conventional narrative is 
 the opening of the former poem : 
 
 "St Agnes' Eve! ah, bitter chill it was," Ac. 
 and of the latter 
 
 "Fair Isabel; poor simple Isabel! 
 
 Loreuzo, a young palmer in Love's eye. 
 They could not in the ae If same mansion dwell. 
 Without stixne. stir of heart, some malady:" 
 
 yet the inter\'als 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 chapel- aisle ; 
 
 *'And scarce three steps ere ^lude't golden tongue 
 Flattered to tear* 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 Pom- 
 pilia. On the other hand, the naivete of v/hich 
 Wordsworth in his earlier days so eagerly made his 
 poetry the vehicle can only be called with a qualifi- 
 
§§ 13, 14.J ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 35 
 
 cation Romantic; it involves too largely for the 
 most part that flavour of the modern 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 IGth, 
 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 
 offended 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 re(piire- 
 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 banishiug the uncouth, the 
 ruiie, the repelling. 
 
 In fa<;t the modern Romantic admission of the 
 repulsive rested on exceedingly complex conditions. 
 It was partly due to that higher sense of beautv. 
 which finds an aesthetic value in discord. It was 
 not only an assertion of nature against the exclusive- 
 
 3—2 
 
36 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. IIL 
 
 nes3 of an artificial society, but also an attack upon 
 the imperfect aesthetic insight which made it exclu- 
 sive. Revolt against the privileges of pure beauty 
 as such, was added to disparagement of the kind of 
 beauty which had hitherto alone enjoyed them. 
 The artistic opposition of variety to monotony, the 
 political opposition of the outcast to the privileged, 
 the antiquarian opposition of mediaeval unreserve to 
 modem refinement, the ethical opposition of mediae- 
 val asceticism 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 Koraantic admission of the repulsive. 
 
 In France Victor Hugo vehemently asserted its 
 rights in art\ and did not a little to put in practice 
 his own precepts*. In England Wordsworth's famous 
 preface, though written from a dififerent j^oint of 
 view — the pt:>eticai value of the natural language of 
 passion, — involved a similar admission of elements 
 repulsive to conventional refinement. In Words- 
 \\orth, however, this aspect of the theory affected 
 merely a phase of his poetry, which on the whole is 
 marked by 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 his 
 
 ' Preface to Cromwell. 
 
 * E.g, **La L^gende des SiSclea." 
 
§ 14.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 37 
 
 readers, as the Mariner held the wedding-guest, 
 
 spell-bound till they have heard every detail of his 
 
 'ghastly talc.' 
 
 "The very deep did rot: ClmHt 
 That ever Buch things should be: 
 Yea, fllimy things did creep with legs 
 Upon the slimy sea." 
 
 None of Coleridge'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 Lorenzo, in 
 Isabella, he breaks off suddenly : 
 
 **Ah wherefore all this wormy circumstance 7 
 
 Why Unger at tho yawning tomb so long? 
 O for the gentleness of old Eomance, 
 
 The simple plaining of a minstrel's song 1 
 Fair reader, at the old tale take a glance, 
 
 For here in truth it does not well belong 
 To speak ; turn thee to the very tale, 
 
 And taste the music of that vision pale." 
 
 ^ This reference docs not include the prose writings of Scott. 
 
38 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. IIL 
 
 And he expresses elsewhere explicitly (Sleep and 
 Poetry) the feeling implicitly contained here : — 
 
 ** Strength aloce, though of the Muses bozii. 
 Is like a fallen angel: trees np-tom 
 Darkness and worms and shronds and sepnlchrefl 
 Delight it; for it feeds npon the burrs 
 And thorns of life: forgetting the great end 
 Of poesy, that it should be a friend 
 To soothe the cares and lift the heart of man.** 
 
 This is another instance of the conflict of complex 
 motives, which we have had to notice so often. 
 The sense of beauty is partly attracted by the me* 
 diaevai, partly rej^lled by it. 
 
 It is in fact necessary to pass to an age in which 
 the full realism of Romantic genius is not checked 
 by conventional decorum, nor yet condemned by an 
 over-acute sensibility. The poet who inspired Keats 
 shrank from no unrefinement in the simis of hia 
 allegorical pictures : and it was naturally just this 
 point which was chosen for parody by Pope, the 
 typical p4jet 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 from something in 
 itself offensive, as in Spenser, or from something 
 made so by peculiar circumstances, as where a comic 
 motif is intru'Ied in the climax of a tragedy. 
 
 And as Pope has been mentioned, it is proper 
 not to forget that, however coarsely Spenser might 
 express Lis njoral antipathy to abstract vices, Pode 
 
§§ 14, 15.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 39 
 
 without thought of parody entirely equalled hirn, 
 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 Sporus and Shelley's outburst against 
 Gilford in the Adonais, 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 1 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 ; — 
 ciselure. 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- 
 
40 ESSENTIAL CHAIRACTERISTICS, &C. [CH. DL 
 
 meot of pamting, these two aims are inextricably 
 blended : and I shall not dwell upon the distinction, 
 which it is nevertheless important to remark. Take 
 as illustrations these few phrases of Keats, which 
 without fancy— (with that we are not here con- 
 cerned)— vividly describe natural facts such as the 
 classical jtoet, a humanist who cares for nature only 
 in its relation to man, passes by with unconcern : 
 *tbe most patient brilliance of the moon,* — *the 
 calm-throated nightingale^' — * cool-rooted flowers,' — 
 * minnows, staying their wavy bodies 'gainst the 
 streams, nestling their silver bellies on the pebbly 
 sand.* 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 STYLE AS FORMALLY AFFECTED (l) BY EilOTION. 
 
 § 16. "Alles Lyrisclie," says Goethe, "musz im 
 Ganzen sehr verniinftig, im Einzelnen ein Biszchen 
 unverniinftig 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 tlian man, a mode 
 of ullterance 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 languoge 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 inter- 
 
42 ESSEN TIAI. CHABACTERlSnCS OF THE [CH. IV. 
 
 jections, which alone now represent that function, 
 merely a last despised chapter of grammar. It is 
 rather in the characteristics which accompany the 
 expression titan in the means consciously adopted to 
 mark it that the resemblance lies. These may be 
 defined as incoherence and iteration: two features 
 which doubtless often arise from other causes than 
 strong feeling, but, on the other hand, are conspicu- 
 ously avoided in the language of calm reason. To a 
 large 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 alonsr 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 Re- 
 flective thought, on the contrary, avoids equally the 
 incomplete and the superfluous. 
 
 Of tliis nature is the contrast of Classic and Ro- 
 mantic style as affected by passion. Incoherence 
 
§ IC] ROMANTIC AND 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 tho 
 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 Romantic 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 wliibh either the po-thetic or the imaginative ele- 
 ments- of lyric inspiration preponderates. Here is an 
 example from Keats*. 
 
 "0 Melancholy, linger hero axvhilel 
 
 O Music, muriic, breathe despond inslyl 
 .. -«- -Q Echo, echo, from some eombre isle, 
 
 Unknown, Lethean, pigh to uy — eighl 
 Spirits in grief, lifL up your heads and smile; 
 Lift up your heada, Bweet epiiits, heavily." 
 
 One can fancy some Aristophanes ridiculing this 
 pathetic Earipidoan iteration, in the modern critical 
 Dionysia of a Quarterly Review I Take again tha 
 iteration not of pathos but of impassioned imagi- 
 nation in Shelley's description of the "winged in- 
 fant':"— 
 
 •• white 
 Its countenance, like the whiteness of whit« snow, 
 Its hair is white, the brightness of white light 
 Scattered in strings." 
 
 The classical poet would have been content to 
 
 1 hahclla, lv. 
 " P. Unb. Acts IV. 
 
^ ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. IV. 
 
 notify its colour once for all; the sensuous vividness 
 of the white colour would have no enthralling at- 
 traction to his pen; it forms indeed a part of the 
 picture, and he will not omit it; hut for the same 
 reason he will not dwell on it, and this ample 
 utterance of an imagination at white heat appears to 
 him like the idle redundance of childhood. 
 
 **A>ane the luxuriant, the nncooth refine, 
 But ebow no mercy 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 Ciiaucer and to that of Spenser, 
 this unreserved utterance of the poet's and artist's 
 a<iraii^tion of things beautiful, strong and noble, his 
 repugnance to ugliness, his recoil before the horrible. 
 'Wondrous* and *good,' *fair' and *lusty/ — ^cruel* 
 'hideous' * dreadful' are for ever on their lips. Such 
 words, when used not descriptively but emotionally, i 
 are, from the standpoint of classical art, as super- 
 fluous as if a sculptor should write 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 :— 
 
§ IC] R'>MANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 45 
 
 "His harmful hatchet he hcnt in hand, 
 (Alafl that it so ready Khould stand :) 
 And to the field alone he speedeth 
 (Ay, little help to harm there needcth I)." 
 
 Or again there is the diffuseness, not as here of 
 comment or exclamation, but of needless detail ; 
 
 •*A hideous roaring far away they heard 
 That all their sonROs filled with affright; 
 And straight they saw the raging surges rear'd 
 Up to the skies, that thera of drowning made affear'd." 
 
 The poet betrays his sympathy ■with his cha- 
 racters by dwelling on tlieir fears. Here we may 
 descend to that meaner kind of dilTuscness ■which 
 arises from no Spenserian enthusiasm but from the 
 mere storyteller's egoistic insistancc upon every detail 
 of his tale. It is here that we are reminded of the 
 tedious narro,tives, happily parodied in the Rime of 
 Sir Tliopas, 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. 720^ compose the soul of wit is charactenstic of 
 Romantic poetry in feebler hands, while extreme 
 abruptness and obscure compression mark where its 
 bolder spirit has been at work. Tho very con- 
 spicuousuess of this quality in the traditional poetry 
 gave it a factitious attraction to poets who admired 
 every thing old: and tho 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- 
 
46 ESSENTIAL CHAKACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. IV. 
 
 rative poeiofl Buch &s IsahelUs and The Eve of S. 
 Agnes f gives liis Pegasus a ^ery loose rein, and 
 suffers bim to take a desultory course, 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 narrative or of 
 dealinsr with the mass of emotion which the climax 
 of a great action arouses. Two modes of accom- 
 pli;>hing this are equally Romantic, and equally 
 opposed; a third, which is 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 close, and strip away 
 with fiery impatience all but the bare indispensable 
 framework of the structure. Witness the most ef- 
 fective close 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 chmax with touches 
 of paler but hrvrmonious colour. Perfect examples 
 of this are found in some of the longer poems of 
 Mr Matthew Arnold. There is no dissolution of the 
 
§§ 16, 17.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 47 
 
 climax in Sohrab and Riistuw,: 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 stern outlines with a tender opalescence of 
 gentler sentiment. Nor 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 wiiih its sleeping birds 
 jand beasts, and Apollo and the Nine glistening 
 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 incoherence of lyric 
 expression, — the Biszchen unverniinfdges of Goethe's 
 phrase. By this I only mean, as I conceive that ho 
 only meant, a tenuity, an impa!2)able 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- 
 
48 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. IV. 
 
 sion of this sort might be compared with a broken 
 bridge which checks the passage of the creeping 
 thing but does not stay the bird. For illustration 
 I shall in the first place refer to an influence which, 
 contemporaneous only with the eTrtyovoi of Roman- 
 ticism and by no means confluent through its whole 
 range with Romantic tendencies, deserves to be intro- 
 duced, a.s a notable source 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 very 
 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 fact 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 from within. The spontaneity of vegetable 
 and animal growth, anomalous on the one plan, 
 became typical ia the other. Life per\'ades all 
 things: the inanimate seems impossible: rest is but 
 the outer garb of internal activity; sleep the vesture 
 
§ 17.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 49 
 
 of dreams, death the gate to a life freed from the 
 limitations of individualityS 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 tlic 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. AD those words then which have grown so 
 vague that they no longer call up a vivid picture to 
 the imagination but only serve as the imperfect 
 symbols of mental algebra, — v.'ords 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. Sbellcy's Adonais. 
 H. 4 
 
50 ESSEXTLAl. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. IV. 
 
 of a higher phase of force: when for instance, in that 
 profound negation of the absolutely inanimate of 
 which I liave 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 swiftness and 
 vigour*, when any suggestion of motion grows at 
 once into a picture of vehement life. 
 
 Take again some of the ever-recurring metaphors 
 of the simpler kind ; those for example to which is 
 chiefly due the mannerism that clings to Shelley's 
 style. The winds are often *dim,' the wiugs of 
 spiiits * winnow ' the crimson dawn, curses fall 
 ' tiake by fiake/ the eagle is 'entangled in the whiri- 
 wind.' That highly Shelleyan line which closes the 
 third Act of the Prometheus 
 
 *' Pinnacled dim in the intense inane" 
 
 is al&o in various respects highly Romantic. Almost 
 every v/ord 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 earth), "iiife pulses in the stony veins," 
 
 Shelley, Prom. Unbound. 
 "*The crawling glaciers cut me with the spears 
 Of their moon-freezing crystals." 
 
 16. 
 
§ 17.J ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 51 
 
 di7n, though involving no such subtle conception, has 
 
 a certain association of mystery wliich 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 conventional poetry, as the bare 
 
 residue which survives the abstraction of all the most 
 
 vital (pialities 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, wluch is the character of 
 
 all metaphor, to substitute for the literal picture of 
 
 an object an image of something 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 repeated 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 brush, 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 Miitthow Arnold's similar use : — 
 
 **In the intense clear star-sown vault of heaven." 
 
52 ESSENTIAL CHAKACTKRISTICS OF THE [CH, IV. 
 
 and shade. Take among countless examples this 
 stanza of the Adonais (S2) : 
 
 **A p&rd-like spirit beantifal and swift, 
 A lo^e in desolation masked, a power 
 Girt round with weakness: it can scarce uplift 
 The weight of the superincumbent hour. 
 It is a dying leaf, — a falling shower — 
 A breaking billow; even whilst we speak 
 Jb it not broken?** 
 
 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 
 exi)res3ing them with 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 prucecs, but carried far beyond the boldest 
 affectations of art-coteries, marks the Romuitic 
 effort to utter the new intensity of feeling which 
 belongs to the era. The intoxication of music, esj^e- 
 ciaily, which poor inarticulate Caleb Garth could 
 express no better than by a nervous scraping of his 
 stick upon the floor, and \^hich even cultivated lan- 
 guage renders so feebly, breaks out in this poetry 
 into the boldest and most luxuriant imagery. To 
 Siielley the sp^'rits appear * wrapped in sweet sounds 
 
§ 18.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 53 
 
 as in bright veils;' to Keats delicious symphonies 
 bud and swell, and blow ' like airy flowers ; ' and in 
 the melody of the carillon Victor Hugo hears a 
 gay spirit descending ' vetue 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 dilferent conception of nature is 
 doubtless more Romantic : that in which 
 
 "There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdcst 
 But in his motion like an angel sings 
 Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim." 
 
 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 Vfirieties 
 of progress all the apparent aberations of human 
 will. With him reason guides the whole, as with 
 them impulse or inspiration' every part : and what 
 eachf discerns as the guiding principle of nature, he 
 honciurs 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 
 
54 ESSENTIAL CHAKACTERISTIC9 OF THE [CH. IV. 
 
 two extremes, and whose style accordingly displays 
 
 the complexity of a transition, at once suffused with 
 
 the receding and tinged with the rising light. The 
 
 poems of Gray and Collins unite the exquisiteness 
 
 and refinement of the classical genius at its best with 
 
 something of the true Romantic abandon, 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 itself. 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 affinit}' to the wide 
 
 literary sympathies of the Romantic movement : 
 
 Collins, like Victor Hugo, like Goethe, had his 
 
 oriental eclogues, and shows the mystic vein of 
 
 Romance in his ode on the superstitions of Scotland*; 
 
 and Gray, who for his 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 i& cbuwwiterbtic cf Ms age that he still calls them supei^ 
 fituivins. 
 
§ 18.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 55 
 
 of PersoTiification. Both are somewhat prone to 
 throw about the abstractions in which they think 
 there is a factitious sembLance of humanity. Both, 
 beside their formal odes to Liberty, Mercy, Ad versity» 
 &c. — abound in rainor instances of this transforma- 
 tion. But Gray too often uses in the process only 
 the simple devices of a capital Jotter and a personal 
 pronoun, faintly coloured by some simple and obvious 
 attribute. The 'sweeping whirlwind,* 'fierce war* 
 and ' faitliful love,* * Truth severe by fairy Fiction 
 drest,' — ' cares ' that are ' sullen * and Passions that 
 are 'frantic,* — such is for the most part the rather 
 factitious personification of Gray. 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 Sjynncf * with dewy 
 fingers cold' falls indeed short of the Romantic 
 boldness of Blake's — 
 
 **H) Thou with dewy locks, who lookpst down 
 Through the clear windows of the morning, turn 
 Thine angel eyes upon our western isle 
 Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring." 
 
 Nor have the Passions quite the picturesque 
 glow of Spimser: 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 
 
56 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS, &C. [CH. IV. 
 
 poetry of all times, impelled to combine high and 
 abstract thought with vivid, concrete form. In 
 Gray and Collins it is partly due to the influence of 
 Pindar, partly to that of Spenser, the coryphaeus of 
 English allegory. In either case it must be regarded 
 as rather a Romantic than a classical characteristic. 
 It ha.s an unreality foreign to the transparency of 
 meaning and leluctance to employ a needless fiction, 
 which are conspicuously classic. Even Pindar's 
 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 strano^e it mav seem — Romantic: and 
 whatever associations may connect personification 
 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, instea^l of raising 
 a brilliant phantasmagoria of high-WTOught allegory, 
 which only emphasizes, by the seeming substiintiality 
 of these abstractions, the Romantic unreality of the 
 Vrhoie. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 STYLE AS FORMALLY AFFECTED (II) BY FANCY. 
 
 § 10. The poetry of Gray, in which the lyric 
 qiiahty is, as we have seen, impaired by sometliing 
 of coldness and sometliing 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 o{ 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 stinging of a new one, — 
 }X)etry 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 strancfeness, 
 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 
 
58 ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OP THE [CH. V. 
 
 as to fall with some shock of novelty even upon an 
 ear prepare<l for it. On the other hand, these two 
 kindled fonns of strangeness instead of conflicting 
 may coincide : an effect at once strange in itself and 
 unexj)ected may intemipt the familiar and habitual. 
 In such cases the result may be piquant or crude, 
 stimulating or displeasing, according as the inter- 
 rupted effect was still pleasing or were become trite. 
 Truth and beauty, it is said, are the same : and it is 
 true, 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 truth and 
 strangeness: it gives the delight of recognition, but 
 recognition which though immediate is unwonted 
 and delight v/hich 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 too little qualified by 
 novelty: and accordingly the originality of the Ro- 
 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: — 
 
 *'Wherj forty winters shall besiege thy brow 
 And dig deep trenches 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 
 extravagr.nt, and with a touch of beauty as well 
 as quainiL^ess; and it has that air of an inspiration 
 easily provoked to adventure and slow to return 
 from it v/hich 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 Pastorals of Pope, for 
 . instance, — a work fairly typical of the less classical 
 side of classicism — the description of nature is of a 
 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 
 
Co ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. V. 
 
 stage of growth : and the forms '^ith which it peoples 
 mountain and wood are, like itself, not far removed 
 from the spontaneous and unreflective life of nature 
 which suggested them at first, and which remains 
 when they vanish. The forms 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. Tiie favourite metaphor for colour — e.g, 
 'blushing' — suggests forcibly the atmosphere of 
 civilised society. We meet with 'blushing flowers,' 
 and 'blushing berries*;* and * blushing Flora paints 
 the enamel'd ground*.' 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 blight flowers 
 and buds when they do not 'blush' rarely fail to 
 wear ' dyes.' So again the larks when thev * leave 
 their little lives in air* are busy 'preparing their 
 notes.* Theirs is not the * unpremeditatetl art' of 
 Shelley's Skiilark^ a poem in v;hich what I have 
 calieil 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. 
 
 ' Windsor Forent, 38, 
 
 * It is interesting to observe that music has associations distinctly 
 more in accor-l with natare than those of painting. This seems to 
 be partly because as a matter of history its invention belongs to 
 a more primitive eix)ch; partly because painting, being primarily 
 imitative, is more decidedly artificial than music, which originated 
 in the epontaueoos utterance^ of feeling. 
 
§ 19.] ROAIANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. Gl 
 
 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, 
 viokiting as it does the continuity and order which 
 are of its essence. 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 clearness, I shall here devote a para- 
 gra])h 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 Duuciad and of Gullivers Travels: he will 
 display a descriptive boldness not less than that with 
 
62 ESSENTIAL CHABACTEEISTICS OF THE [CH. V. 
 
 which the Romantic poet threads the subtlest laby- 
 rinths of hid imagination. It is needless to illustrate 
 in detail; a few of Pope's portraits from the Dunciad, 
 Epistle to Arbuthnot and Satires would suffice. On 
 the other hand, the purity of Augustan classicism 
 was impaired by a blind imitation which, instead of 
 transLiting 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 from the similar pseudo-classicism of 
 France. Nature, which to the Teutonic peoples — at 
 least to the literary portions of them — had long cast 
 off the rude and mysterious robe which Teutonic 
 imagination had cast about her, could not dow 
 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 Tiiomson 
 and Goldiimith and Cowper caught in some de^Tee 
 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'!. CtM.Lh!..- 
 
 LlbhAlu j 
 
§ 20.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. G3 
 
 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. Pseudo- Hellenism was conventional, it was 
 fashionable ; 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 higlicr region of stylo, — ^general 
 construction,— as 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. 
 
 Fii>;t, the association of grave and gay. This 
 fantastic combination of the serioas and comic must 
 be distinguished from that Sliaksperean 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 contrast: but in the 
 former the end is merely the surprise, in the latter, 
 Schiller notwithstanding, the tragic element derives 
 an enhanced and unique intensity from the transient 
 intervention of the comic. The one miglit be com- 
 pared to the alternate shower and sunshine of an 
 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 thunderstonn. 
 Such is the difference between the easy mingling of 
 
64 ESSENTIAL CHAIUCTERISTIC8 OF THE [CH. V. 
 
 these elements io Henry IV ^ Comedy of Errors^ the 
 Tempest, As you Like it, or the ^V^nter8 Tale, and 
 that Etemer and subtler genius which sets off with 
 clownish jests the real pathos, touched 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 whole circumstances, which is given by the 
 association of different times and countries : as when 
 the bold weavers of Elizabethan Eiigland are tor- 
 mented by mediaeval fairies and make amusement 
 for a king of mythic Athens, or when Enorlish squires 
 and knights royster in the country-bouses of lUyria ; 
 or again where not merely history or geography but 
 general probability suffers playful violence, the whole 
 conception being pointedly fantastic and unreal, as 
 in the forest en«x)unters 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 jwirticular 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 course not forgetting that the peculiar plot of this play has 
 the authority of Piautus and of Mtnander : we are however 
 too familiar' by this tune with the paradoxes of the subject to 
 suppose that Greek and Classic are equivalent terms. 
 
 * CtfrnhtUiw is probably among the later: it is placed by 
 Prof. Ward 3Ub in the list {Hut. of Eng. Drama, i. 435). 
 
§ 20.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL 3TYLES. 05 
 
 instnmionts whence the poet blows as it were ix 
 brilli<ant bubble of illusion which at the climax bursts 
 and disappears. Or again, though involving no 
 mistaken identity the incident itself may 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 Venice*. To a yet airier region belong the 
 hallucinations due to supernatural influence, of which 
 the typical and immortal instrument is Puck, tlie 
 Ate of Romantic 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 Greek Ate, 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 matter of fact both the minor and the major argument 
 of this play, as oi many others, appear to have an Eastern origin. 
 
66 ESSENTIAL CHAaACTERISTICS, &C. [CJH. V. 
 
 most daring vagaries of Romantic incident, whether 
 it appear in the reassertion of the moral law against 
 Macbeth, or in the return to their right minds which 
 the 'naughty spirit,* chided, finally accomplishes in 
 his deluded lovers^ 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 STYLE AS FORMALLY AFFECTED (ill) BY SENSE OF 
 
 liiYSTERY. 
 
 Conclusion. 
 
 § 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. la 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 evokes a poetic delight : the other is 
 believed to be an intuition, and arouses a religious 
 awe. Hence a difference in treatment. The poet 
 
C8 ESSENTIAL CHAEACTERISTICS OF THE [CH. TL 
 
 freely represents the objects of his fancy, sparing no 
 wealth of colour, no industry of pencil : but where 
 the imagined object is felt to be mysterious, he 
 shrinks from graphic portraiture and substitutes 
 obscure hints. He confines himself more to the 
 immediate presentation, dwells upon the more signi- 
 ficant parts of it, repeats them with emphasis or 
 points to them tjs 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 now form and arising from a quite diFerent source, 
 that peculiarly Romantic tendency to exaggeration 
 of the part which we have already twice encountered. 
 As Itefore an artistic love of contrast, or a devo- 
 tion to the variety of mature, drew the part out of 
 subordination to the whole, so here the sense that 
 each U implicated in something not itself, gives it a 
 like undue predomiiiance. 
 
 A brief illustration of one phase of this effect 
 may sufiice. Take these lines of Ch-istahel. 
 
 ♦•Is the night f billy and Jf k? 
 The mgbt la chilly, bat not dark. 
 The thin grey cloud is spread on high. 
 It covers bat not Lidee the sky: 
 The moon is behind, and at the full: 
 And yet she looks both small and doIL 
 The night is chill, the cloud is grey." 
 
 The very iteration of these simple phrases about 
 the dull night and the grey cloud has the mysterious 
 
§ 22] KOMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 69 
 
 effect which in music is sometimes obtained by tho 
 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 traced 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 tyi>e of constn^c- 
 tion in which there is at once proportion and cori' 
 tinuity. 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 narrow aesthetic and a severe in- 
 tellectual ideal. The two sides of the oppositi(m 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 aio alien to it. A 
 Hellenic art is possible without Hellenic contempt 
 of the ffdp/3apoi. Both sides of tho contrast we have 
 seen influenced by the fundamental tendencies of 
 Romanticism. We have found the idea of nature, 
 whether as a tendency or as a conscious principle, 
 
70 E^EHTIAL CHABACTERI8TICS OF THE [CH. VI. 
 
 producing a realism offeiisive to a narrow aesthetic^ 
 or intellectual taste ; we have found on the other 
 hand imperfection in form ajiaing either from a love 
 of arbitrarioesa in art, one phase of which is the 
 proneness to excessive contrast, — or from stress of 
 feeling, or from absorption in the mysterious. .Some- 
 times it is the iteration or the incompleteness of lyric 
 expression, which produces disproportion; sometimes 
 the abruptnesses, the surprises, the startling con- 
 trasts of fantastic construction which break the 
 contmuity. Nature, as an embodiment of endless 
 variety, art, as selecting the most striking instances 
 of it, and exaggerating them, alike contribute to 
 Romantic efifect. Romantic poetry, to exert its full 
 infiuence, must act on minds not yet trained to 
 demaid perfect proportion and continuity; it teUs 
 by the splendour aod impressiveness of its ideas, 
 rather than by their fitness ; by the brilliance of 
 single stTfjkes, 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 'ETTi^v/iUj, he combines the 
 nobility of ©u/i-o?. In the Romantic 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.] ROMANTIC AND CLASSICAL STYLES. 7l 
 
 in art, any more than in ethics, rightly understood, 
 an absohite 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 BtruRgling suilorcrfl, hurt to death, eho layt 
 Shuddering, they drew her garments off — and found 
 A rohe of Backcloth next the smooth white ekin. 
 
 Such, poets, is your bride, the muse I young, gay, 
 Badiant, adom'd outside; a hidden ground 
 Of thought and of Austerity within." 
 
 NOTE TO CHAPTER I. 
 
 An exhaustive treatment of the subject of Roman- 
 ticism 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 literatu:-e. It would be necessary, 
 for 'example, to describe with what an uproar the wave 
 
72 NOTE. 
 
 which had proceeded from (xermany to invade England 
 and France, broke also upcin Italy. It would be necessary 
 to trace the reflexici of the literary movement in the 
 music of Schubert and Schumann, and in the painting of 
 Overl>eck and Schadow. It would be necessary to ex- 
 plain the iiitinxate relation in which this aesthetic move- 
 ment stood with Schelling's philosophy of Nature, — a 
 relation which resulted k.iqi the parallel advance of a 
 one-sided philosophical development of Kant and a one- 
 sided literary development of Schiller, who was at the 
 same time Kant's most eloquent exponent. But the 
 romantic influence on art and on philosophy was transient; 
 and it would be necessary, finally, to show how the 
 movement did in one sphere obtain an abiding though 
 little recognised influence, by immensely furthering the 
 adcption of that historictJ point of view which has led 
 to so great a revolution in our conception of the past. 
 Biit Exigland, never fully mastered by the mo\'ementd of 
 the continent, — half convert of the Renascence, imper- 
 fect disciple of. the Revolution, absorbing slowly what 
 attracts its somewhat limited sensibility, and rejecting 
 rather with the slight impatience of a satisfied curiosity 
 than with any deep-seated revulsion of passion, — England 
 felt little these wide-reaching ramifications of Roman- 
 ticism; or if she felt them, it was as single and separate 
 movements which scarcely penetrated deep enough to 
 rouse I he consciousness of their common origin. 
 
 r&UETKI* BT C. J. CLAY. tLA^ AT THB VSITKB8ITT TUtm. 
 
1 A 
 
 HOME USE ^z 
 
 CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT 
 MAIN LIBRARY 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below 
 
 ft mnnil.'?^"^ ""^y ^^ ''^"^^ed by calling 642-3405 
 6-month loans may be recharged by bringing books 
 
 to Circulation Desk. 
 Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior 
 
 to due date. 
 
 ALL BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO RECALL 7 DAYS 
 
 AFTER DATE CHECKED OUT. 
 
 
 
 Bit CB^fiova 5 *8Q 
 
 ■.H'!\I9 51981 
 
 fJilc MiJ*- 
 
 .Av-^. ^. 19B^ ^.01^ AUG ^7 '8S > 
 
 LD21 — A-40W-I2 '74 
 (S2700L) ' 
 
 ., General Library 
 University of California 
 Berkeley 
 
itockfon, Colif. 
 
 <^D315M=5t.b