Transcribed from the 1916 Princeton University Press edition by David
Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org
LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION
ROMANCE
TWO LECTURES BY
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
M.A., PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, FELLOW OF
MERTON COLLEGE
LECTURES DELIVERED AT PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY, MAY 4TH AND 6TH, 1915
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1916
Copyright, 1916, by
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published October, 1916
THE ORIGIN OF ROMANCE
The period of English political history which falls between Pitt's
acceptance of office as prime minister, in 1783, and the passing of the
Reform Bill, in 1832, is a period rich in character and event. The same
period of fifty years is one of the most crowded epochs of our national
literature. In 1783 William Blake produced his _Poetical Sketches_, and
George Crabbe published _The Village_. In 1832 Scott died, not many
months after the death of Goethe. Between these two dates a great
company of English writers produced a literature of immense bulk, and of
almost endless diversity of character. Yet one dominant strain in that
literature has commonly been allowed to give a name to the whole period,
and it is often called the Age of the Romantic Revival.
We do not name other notable periods of our literature in this fashion.
The name itself contains a theory, and so marks the rise of a new
philosophical and aesthetic criticism. It attempts to describe as well
as to name, and attaches significance not to kings, or great authors, but
to the kind of writing which flourished conspicuously in that age. A
less ambitious and much more secure name would have been the Age of
George III; but this name has seldom been used, perhaps because the
writers of his time who reverenced King George III were not very many in
number. The danger of basing a name on a theory of literature is that
the theory may very easily be superseded, or may prove to be inadequate,
and then the name, having become immutable by the force of custom, is
left standing, a monument of ancient error. The terminology of the
sciences, which pretends to be exact and colourless, is always being
reduced to emptiness by the progress of knowledge. The thing that struck
the first observer is proved to be less important than he thought it.
Scientific names, for all their air of learned universality, are merely
fossilized impressions, stereotyped portraits of a single aspect. The
decorous obscurity of the ancient languages is used to conceal an immense
diversity of principle. Mammal, amphibian, coleoptera, dicotyledon,
cryptogam,--all these terms, which, if they were translated into the
language of a peasant, would be seen to record very simple observations,
yet do lend a kind of formal majesty to ignorance.
So it is with the vocabulary of literary criticism: the first use of a
name, because the name was coined by someone who felt the need of it, is
often striking and instructive; the impression is fresh and new. Then
the freshness wears off it, and the name becomes an outworn print, a
label that serves only to recall the memory of past travel. What was
created for the needs of thought becomes a thrifty device, useful only to
save thinking. The best way to restore the habit of thinking is to do
away with the names. The word Romantic loses almost all its meaning and
value when it is used to characterize whole periods of our literature.
Landor and Crabbe belong to a Romantic era of poetry; Steele and Sterne
wrote prose in an age which set before itself the Classic ideal. Yet
there is hardly any distinctively Classical beauty in English verse which
cannot be exemplified from the poetry of Landor and Crabbe; and there are
not very many characteristics of Romantic prose which find no
illustration in the writings of Steele and Sterne. Nevertheless, the
very name of romance has wielded such a power in human affairs, and has
so habitually impressed the human imagination, that time is not misspent
in exhibiting its historical bearings. These great vague words, invented
to facilitate reference to whole centuries of human history--Middle Ages,
Renaissance, Protestant Reformation, Revival of Romance--are very often
invoked as if they were something ultimate, as if the names themselves
were a sufficient explanation of all that they include. So an imperfect
terminology is used to gain esteem for an artificial and rigid conception
of things which were as fluid as life itself. The Renaissance, for
instance, in its strict original meaning, is the name for that renewed
study of the classical literatures which manifested itself throughout the
chief countries of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In
Italy, where the movement had its origin, no single conspicuous event can
be used to date it. The traditions inherited from Greece and Rome had
never lost their authority; but with the increase of wealth and leisure
in the city republics they were renewed and strengthened. From being
remnants and memories they became live models; Latin poetry was revived,
and Italian poetry was disciplined by the ancient masters. But the
Renaissance, when it reached the shores of England, so far from giving
new life to the literature it found there, at first degraded it. It
killed the splendid prose school of Malory and Berners, and prose did not
run clear again for a century. It bewildered and confused the minds of
poets, and blending itself with the national tradition, produced the rich
lawlessness of the English sixteenth century. It was a strong tributary
to the stream of our national literature; but the popular usage, which
assigns all that is good in the English literature of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries to a mysterious event called the Renaissance, is
merely absurd. Modern scholars, if they are forced to find a beginning
for modern literature, would prefer to date it from the wonderful
outburst of vernacular poetry in the latter part of the twelfth century,
and, if they must name a birthplace, would claim attention for the Court
of King Henry II.
In some of its aspects, the Romantic revival may be exhibited as a
natural consequence of the Renaissance. Classical scholarship at first
scorned the vernacular literatures, and did all its work of criticism and
imitation in the Latin tongue. By degrees the lesson was widened, and
applied to the modern languages. Study; imitation in Latin; extension of
classical usages and principles to modern literature,--these were the
regular stages in the progress of the classical influence. When the
poets of France and England, to name no others, had learned as much as
they were able and willing to learn from the masters of Greece and Rome,
the work of the Renaissance was done. By the middle of the eighteenth
century there was no notable kind of Greek or Latin
literature--historical, philosophical, poetical; epic, elegy, ode,
satire--which had not worthy disciples and rivals in the literatures of
France and England. Nothing remained to do but to go further afield and
seek for new masters. These might easily have been found among the poets
and prophets of the East, and not a few notable writers of the time began
to forage in that direction. But the East was too remote and strange,
and its languages were too little known, for this attempt to be carried
far; the imitation of Chinese and Persian models was practised chiefly by
way of fantasy and joke. The study of the neglected and forgotten matter
of mediaeval times, on the other hand, was undertaken by serious
scholars. The progress of the mediaeval influence reproduced very
exactly the successive phases of the Classical Renaissance. At first
there was study; and books like Sainte Palaye's _Memoirs of Ancient
Chivalry_, and Paul Henri Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_, enjoyed a
European reputation. Then followed the period of forgery and imitation,
the age of Ossian and Chatterton, Horace Walpole and Bishop Percy.
Lastly, the poets enrolled themselves in the new school, and an original
literature, suggested by the old, was created by Sir Walter Scott,
Coleridge, and Keats. It was the temper of the antiquary and the
sceptic, in the age of Gibbon and Hume, that begot the Romantic Revival;
and the rebellion of the younger age against the spirit of the eighteenth
century was the rebellion of a child against its parents.
It is not needful, nor indeed is it possible, to define Romance. In the
mathematical sciences definitions are all-important, because with them
the definition is the thing. When a mathematician asks you to describe a
circle, he asks you to create one. But the man who asks you to describe
a monkey is less exacting; he will be content if you mention some of the
features that seem to you to distinguish a monkey from other animals.
Such a description must needs be based on personal impressions and ideas;
some features must be chosen as being more significant than the rest. In
the history of literature there are only two really significant
things--men, and books. To study the ascertained facts concerning men
and books is to study biography and bibliography, two sciences which
between them supply the only competent and modest part of the history of
literature. To discern the significance of men and books, to classify
and explain them, is another matter. We have not, and we never shall
have, a calculus sufficient for human life even at its weakest and
poorest. Let him who conceives high hopes from the progress of knowledge
and the pertinacity of thought tame and subdue his pride by considering,
for a moment, the game of chess. That game is played with thirty-two
pieces, of six different kinds, on a board of sixty-four squares. Each
kind of piece has one allotted mode of action, which is further cramped
by severe limitations of space. The conditions imposed upon the game are
strict, uniform, and mechanical. Yet those who have made of chess a life-
long study are ready to confess their complete ignorance of the
fundamental merits of particular moves; one game does not resemble
another; and from the most commonplace of developments there may spring
up, on the sudden, wild romantic possibilities and situations that are
like miracles. If these surprising flowers of fancy grow on the chess-
board, how shall we set a limit to the possibilities of human life, which
is chess, with variety and uncertainty many million times increased? It
is prudent, therefore, to say little of the laws which govern the course
of human history, to avoid, except for pastime, the discussion of
tendencies and movements, and to speak chiefly of men and books. If an
author can be exhibited as the effect of certain causes (and I do not
deny that some authors can plausibly be so exhibited) he loses his virtue
as an author. He thought of himself as a cause, a surprising intruder
upon the routine of the world, an original creator. I think that he is
right, and that the profitable study of a man is the study which regards
him as an oddity, not a quiddity.
A general statement of the law that governs literary history may perhaps
be borrowed from the most unreasonable of the arts--the art of dress. One
of the powerful rulers of men, and therefore of books, is Fashion, and
the fluctuations of literary fashion make up a great part of literary
history. If the history of a single fashion in dress could ever be
written, it would illuminate the literary problem. The motives at work
are the same; thoughtful wearers of clothes, like thoughtful authors, are
all trying to do something new, within the limits assigned by practical
utility and social sympathy. Each desires to express himself and yet in
that very act to win the admiration and liking of his fellows. The great
object is to wear the weeds of humanity with a difference. Some authors,
it is true, like timid or lazy dressers, desire only to conform to usage.
But these, as M. Brunetiere remarks in one of his historical essays, are
precisely the authors who do not count. An author who respects himself
is not content if his work is mistaken for another's, even if that other
be one of the gods of his idolatry. He would rather write his own
signature across faulty work than sink into a copyist of merit. This
eternal temper of self-assertion, this spirit of invention, this
determination to add something or alter something, is no doubt the
principle of life. It questions accepted standards, and makes of
reaction from the reigning fashion a permanent force in literature. The
young want something to do; they will not be loyal subjects in a kingdom
where no land remains to be taken up, nor will they allow the praise of
the dead to be the last word in criticism. Why should they paraphrase
old verdicts?
The sway of Fashion often bears hardest on a good author just dead, when
the generation that discovered him and acclaimed him begins to pass away.
Then it is not what he did that attracts the notice of the younger sort,
but what he left undone. Tennyson is discovered to be no great thinker.
Pope, who, when his star was in the ascendant, was "Mr. Pope, the new
Poet," has to submit to examination by the Headmaster of Winchester, who
decides that he is not a poet, except in an inferior sense. Shakespeare
is dragged to the bar by Thomas Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree
of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly in clear and
vigorous English, that Shakespeare has no capacity for tragic writing.
Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renaissance, into the Gothic
darkness. So the pendulum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, even
in the shortest of its variable oscillations, to revisit the greatest
writers, who are nearest to the centre of rest. Wit and sense, which are
raised by one age into the very essentials of good poetry, are denied the
name of poetry by the next; sentiment, the virtue of one age, is the
exploded vice of another; and Romance comes in and goes out with secular
regularity.
The meaning of Romance will never come home to him who seeks for it in
modern controversies. The name Romance is itself a memorial of the
conquest of Europe by the Romans. They imposed their language on half
Europe, and profoundly influenced the other half. The dialectical,
provincial Latin, of various kinds, spoken by the conquered peoples,
became the Romance speech; and Romance literature was the new literature
which grew up among these peoples from the ninth century onwards,--or
from an earlier time, if the fringe of Celtic peoples, who kept their
language but felt the full influence of Christianity, be taken into the
account. The chief thing to be noted concerning Romance literature is
that it was a Christian literature, finding its background and
inspiration in the ideas to which the Christian Church gave currency.
While Rome spread her conquests over Europe, at the very heart of her
empire Christianity took root, and by slow process transformed that
empire. During the Middle Ages the Bishops of Rome sat in the seat of
the Roman Emperors. This startling change possessed Gibbon's
imagination, and is the theme of his great work. But the whole of
Gibbon's history was anticipated and condensed by Hobbes in a single
sentence--"If a man considers the original of this great ecclesiastical
dominion, he will easily perceive that the Papacy is no other than the
ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave
thereof. For so did the Papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of
that heathen power."
Here, then, is the answer to a question which at once suggests itself.
How do we get this famous opposition between the older Latin literature
and the literature of those countries which had inherited or accepted the
Latin tradition? Why did not the Romans hand over their literature and
teach it, as they handed over and taught their law? They did teach it in
their schools; grammar and rhetoric, two of the chief subjects of a
liberal education, were purely literary studies, based on the work of the
literary masters of Rome. Never was there an education so completely
literary as the organized education of Rome and of her provinces. How
came it that there was any breach between the old and the new?
A question of this kind, involving centuries of history, does not admit
of a perfectly simple answer. It may be very reasonably maintained that
in Rome education killed literature. A carefully organized, universal
system of education, which takes for its material the work of great poets
and orators, is certain to breed a whole army of slaves. The teachers,
employed by the machine to expound ideas not their own, soon erect
systems of pedantic dogma, under which the living part of literature is
buried. The experience of ancient Rome is being repeated in the England
of to-day. The officials responsible for education, whatever they may
uneasily pretend, are forced by the necessities of their work to
encourage uniformity, and national education becomes a warehouse of
second-hand goods, presided over by men who cheerfully explain the mind
of Burke or of Shakespeare, adjusting the place of each, and balancing
faults against merits. But Roman education throughout the Empire had
further difficulties to encounter. To understand these it must be
remembered what Latin literature was. The Latins, when we first discern
them in the dim light of the past, were a small, strenuous, political
people, with a passion for government and war. They first subdued Italy,
and no very serious culture-problem resulted from that conquest. The
Etruscans certainly contributed much to Latin civilization, but their
separate history is lost. No one knows what the Etruscans thought. The
Romans do not seem to have cared. They welded Italy together, and
thereafter came into contact with the older, richer civilizations of the
Mediterranean shores. The chief of these, in its influence, was the
Greek civilization, as it had developed in that famous group of free city
states, fostered by the sun and air, and addicted to life. In Athens, at
the time of her glory, life was not a habit, but an experiment. Even the
conservative Romans were infected. They fell under the sway of Greek
thought. When a practical man of business becomes intimate with an
artist, he is never the same man again. The thought of that
disinterested mode of life haunts his dreams. So Rome, though she had
paid little regard to the other ancient peoples with whom she had had
traffic and war, put herself to school to the Greeks. She accepted the
Greek pantheon, renamed the Greek gods and goddesses, and translated and
adopted Greek culture. The real Roman religion was a religion of the
homestead, simple, pious, domestic, but they now added foreign ornaments.
So also with literature; their own native literature was scanty and
practical--laws and rustic proverbs--but they set themselves to produce a
new literature, modelled on the Greek. Virgil followed Homer; Plautus
copied Menander; and Roman literature took on that secondary and
reminiscent character which it never lost. It was a literature of
culture, not of creed. This people had so practical a genius that they
could put the world in harness; for the decoration of the world they were
willing to depend on foreign loans.
In so far as Latin literature was founded on the Greek, that is, in so
far as it was a derivative and imitative literature, it was not very fit
for missionary purposes. One people can give to another only what is its
own. The Greek gods were useless for export. An example may be taken
from the English rule in India. We can give to the peoples of India our
own representative institutions. We can give them our own authors,
Shakespeare, Burke, Macaulay. But we cannot give them Homer and Virgil,
who nevertheless continue to play an appreciable part in training the
English mind; and we can hardly give them Milton, whose subtlest beauties
depend on the niceties of the Latin speech. The trial for Latin
literature came when obscurely, in the purlieus and kennels of Rome, like
a hidden fermentation, Christianity arose. The earliest Christians were
for the most part illiterate; but when at last Christianity reached the
high places of the government, and controlled the Empire, a problem of
enormous difficulty presented itself for solution. The whole elaborate
educational system of the Romans was founded on the older literature and
the older creeds. All education, law, and culture were pagan. How could
the Christians be educated; and how, unless they were educated, could
they appeal to the minds of educated men? So began a long struggle,
which continued for many centuries, and swayed this way and that. Was
Christianity to be founded barely on the Gospel precepts and on a way of
life, or was it to seek to subdue the world by yielding to it? This, the
religious problem, is the chief educational problem in recorded history.
There were the usual parties; and the fiercest, on both sides, counselled
no surrender. Tertullian, careful for the purity of the new religion,
held it an unlawful thing for Christians to become teachers in the Roman
schools. Later, in the reign of Julian the Apostate, an edict forbade
Christians to teach in the schools, but this time for another reason,
lest they should draw away the youth from the older faith. In the end
the result was a practical compromise, arranged by certain ecclesiastical
politicians, themselves lovers of letters, between the old world and the
new. It was agreed, in effect, that the schools should teach humane
letters and mythology, leaving it to the Church to teach divine doctrine
and the conduct of life. All later history bears the marks of this
compromise. Here was the beginning of that distinction and apportionment
between the secular and the sacred which is so much more conspicuous in
Christian communities than ever it has been among the followers of other
religions. Here also was the beginning of that strange mixture, familiar
to all students of literature, whereby the Bible and Virgil are quoted as
equal authorities, Plato is set over against St. Paul, the Sibyl confirms
the words of David, and, when a youth of promise, destined for the
Church, is drowned, St. Peter and a river-god are the chief mourners at
his poetic obsequies. This mixture is not a fantasy of the Renaissance;
it has been part and parcel, from the earliest times, of the tradition of
the Christian church.
History is larger than morality; and a wise man will not attempt to pass
judgment on those who found themselves in so unparalleled a position. A
new religion, claiming an authority not of this world, prevailed in this
world, and was confronted with all the resources of civilization,
inextricably entangled with the ancient pagan faiths. What was to be
done? The Gospel precepts seemed to admit of no transaction. "They that
say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if
they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they
might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a
better country, that is an heavenly." The material prosperity and social
order which Law and Politics take such pains to preserve and increase are
no part of their care. They are strangers and pilgrims in the country
where they pitch their tent for a night. How dare they spend time on
cherishing the painted veil called Life, when their desires are fixed on
what it conceals? When Tacitus called the Christian religion "a deadly
superstition," he spoke as a true Roman, a member of the race of Empire-
builders. His subtle political instinct scented danger from those who
looked with coldness on the business and desire of this world. The
Christian faith, which presents no social difficulties while it is
professed here and there by a lonely saint or seer, is another thing when
it becomes the formal creed of a nation. The Christians themselves knew
that to cut themselves off from the country of their birth would have
been a fatal choice, so far as this world is concerned. Their ultimate
decision was to accept Roman civilization and Roman culture, and to add
Christianity to it.
Then followed an age-long attempt to Christianize Latin literature, to
supply believers with a new poetry, written in polished and accomplished
verse, and inspired by Christian doctrine. Of those who attempted this
task, Prudentius is perhaps the greatest name. The attempt could never
have been very successful; those who write in Latin verse must submit to
be judged, not by the truth of their teaching, but by the formal beauties
of their prosody, and the wealth of their allusive learning. Even
Milton, zealot though he be, is esteemed for his manner rather than for
his matter. But the experiment was cut short by the barbarian invasions.
When the Empire was invaded, St. Jerome and St. Augustine, Prudentius and
Symmachus, Claudian and Paulinus of Nola, were all alive. These men, in
varying degrees, had compounded and blended the two elements, the pagan
and the Christian. The two have been compounded ever since. The famous
sevententh century controversy concerning the fitness of sacred subjects
for poetic treatment is but a repetition and an echo of that older and
more vital difference. The two strains could never be perfectly
reconciled, so that a certain impurity and confusion was bequeathed to
modern European literature, not least to English literature. Ours is a
great and various literature, but its rarest virtue is simplicity. Our
best ballads and lyrics are filled with the matter of faith, but as often
as we try the larger kinds of poetry, we inevitably pass over into
reminiscence, learning, criticism,--in a word, culture.
The barbarians seized, or were granted, land; and settled down under
their chiefs. They accepted Christianity, and made it into a warlike
religion. They learned and "corrupted" the Latin language. In their
dialects they had access neither to the literature of ancient Rome, nor
to the imitative scholarly Christian literature, poetry and homily, which
competed with it. Latin continued to be the language of religion and
law. It was full of terms and allusions which meant nothing to them.
They knew something of government,--not of the old republic, but of their
own men and estates. They believed wholly and simply in Christianity,
especially the miraculous part of it. To them (as to all whom it has
most profoundly influenced) it was not a philosophy, but a history of
marvellous events. When, by the operation of society, their dialect had
formed itself, a new literature, unlike anything that had flourished in
ancient Rome, grew up among them. This was Romance, the great literary
form of the Middle Ages. It was a sincere literature, expressive of
their pride in arms and their simple religious faith. The early songs
and ballads, chanted in the Romance speech, have all perished. From a
later time there have come down to us the _Chansons de Geste_, narrative
poems composed by the professional caste of poets to celebrate the deeds
and adventures of the knights who fought the battles of Charlemagne
against the Saracen invader.
The note of this Romance literature is that it was actual, modern,
realistic, at a time when classical literature had become a remote
convention of bookish culture. It was sung in the banqueting-hall, while
Latin poetry was read in the cells of monks. It flourished enormously,
and extended itself to all the matter of history and legend, to King
Arthur, Theseus, Alexander, ancient heroes and warriors who were brought
alive again in the likeness of knights and emperors. Its triumph was so
complete, that its decadence followed swiftly. Like the creatures that
live in the blood of man, literary forms and species commonly die of
their own excess. Romances were multiplied, and imitated; professional
poets, not content with marvels that had now become familiar, sought for
a new sensation in extravagant language and incident. The tales became
more and more sophisticated, elaborate, grotesque, and unreal, until, in
the fourteenth century, a stout townsman, who ticketed bales in a custom-
house, and was the best English poet of his time, found them ridiculous.
In _Sir Thopas_ Chaucer parodies the popular literature of his day. Sir
Thopas is a great reader of romances; he models himself on the heroes
whose deeds possess his imagination, and scours the English countryside,
seeking in vain for the fulfilment of his dreams of prowess.
So Romance declined; and by the end of the seventeenth century the
fashion is completely reversed; the pendulum has swung back; now it is
the literature inspired by the old classical models that is real, and
handles actual human interests, while Romantic literature has become
remote, fictitious, artificial. This does not mean that the men of the
later seventeenth century believed in the gods and Achilles, but not in
the saints and Arthur. It means that classical literature was found best
to imitate for its form. The greater classical writers had described the
life of man, as they saw it, in direct and simple language, carefully
ordered by art. After a long apprenticeship of translation and
imitation, modern writers adopted the old forms, and filled them with
modern matter. The old mythology, when it was kept, was used
allegorically and allusively. Common-sense, pointedly expressed, with
some traditional ornament and fable, became the matter of poetry.
A rough summary of this kind is enough to show how large a question is
involved in the history of Romance. All literary history is a long
record of the struggle between those two rival teachers of man--books,
and the experience of life. Good books describe the world, and teach
whole generations to interpret the world. Because they throw light on
the life of man, they enjoy a vast esteem, and are set up in a position
of authority. Then they generate other books; and literature, receding
further and further from the source of truth, becomes bookish and
conventional, until those who have been taught to see nature through the
spectacles of books grow uneasy, and throw away the distorting glasses,
to look at nature afresh with the naked eye. They also write books, it
may be, and attract a crowd of imitators, who produce a literature no
less servile than the literature it supplants.
This movement of the sincere and independent human mind is found in the
great writers of all periods, and is called the Return to Nature. It is
seen in Pope no less than in Wordsworth; in _The Rape of the Lock_ no
less than in _Peter Bell_. Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic,
and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in
that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted
conventions of the late literary epic. The _Iliad_ is the story of a
quarrel. What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more
distinctive mark of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of the
immediate cause? The insulting removal of a memorial emblem from an
Italian city; the shifting of a reading-desk from one position to another
in a French church; the playful theft of a lock of hair by an amorous
young English nobleman--these were enough, in point of fact, to set whole
communities by the ears, and these are the events celebrated in _The Rape
of the Bucket_, _The Rape of the Lectern_, _The Rape of the Lock_. How
foolish it is to suppose that nature and truth are to be found in one
school of poetry to the exclusion of another! The eternal virtues of
literature are sincerity, clarity, breadth, force, and subtlety. They
are to be found, in diverse combinations, now here and now there. While
the late Latin Christian poets were bound over to Latin models--to
elegant reminiscences of a faded mythology and the tricks of a
professional rhetoric--there arose a new school, intent on making
literature real and modern. These were the Romance poets. If they
pictured Theseus as a duke, and Jason as a wandering knight, it was
because they thought of them as live men, and took means to make them
live for the reader or listener. The realism of the early literature of
the Middle Ages is perhaps best seen in old Irish. The monk bewails the
lawlessness of his wandering thoughts, which run after dreams of beauty
and pleasure during the hour of divine service. The hermit in the wood
describes, with loving minuteness, the contents of his larder. Never was
there a fresher or more spontaneous poetry than the poetry of this early
Christian people. But it is not in the direct line of descent, for it
was written in the Celtic speech of a people who did not achieve the
government of Europe. The French romances inherited the throne, and
passed through all the stages of elaboration and decadence. They too, in
their turn, became a professional rhetoric, false and tedious. When they
ceased to be a true picture of life, they continued in esteem as a school
of manners and deportment for the fantastic gallantry of a court. Yet
through them all their Christian origin shines. Their very themes bear
witness to the teaching of Christian asceticism and Christian idealism.
The quest of a lady never seen; the temptations that present themselves
to a wandering knight under the disguise of beauty and ease;--these, and
many other familiar romantic plots borrow their inspiration from the same
source. Not a few of the old fairy stories, preserved in folk-lore, are
full of religious meaning--they are the Christian literature of the Dark
Ages. Nor is it hard to discern the Christian origins of later Romantic
poetry. Pope's morality has little enough of the religious character:
Know then this truth (enough for Man to know),
Virtue alone is Happiness below.
But Coleridge, when he moralizes, speaks the language of Christianity:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us
He made and loveth all.
The like contrast holds between Dryden and Shelley. It is perhaps hardly
fair to take an example from Dryden's poems on religion; they are
rational arguments on difficult topics, after this fashion:
In doubtful questions 'tis the safest way
To learn what unsuspected ancients say;
For 'tis not likely we should higher soar
In search of heaven than all the church before.
When Dryden writes in his most fervent and magnificent style, he writes
like this:
I will not rake the Dunghill of thy Crimes,
For who would read thy Life that reads thy rhymes?
But of King _David's_ Foes be this the Doom,
May all be like the Young-man _Absalom_;
And for my Foes may this their Blessing be,
To talk like _Doeg_ and to write like Thee.
Nor is it fair to bring Shelley's lame satires into comparison with these
splendors. When Shelley is inspired by his demon, this is how he writes:
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
Some of the great poets of the Romantic Revival took mediaeval literature
for their model, but they did more than that. They returned to the cult
of wild nature; they reintroduced the supernatural, which is a part of
the nature of man; they described seas, and deserts, and mountains, and
the emotions of the soul in loneliness. But so soon as it passed out of
the hands of the greater poets, this revived Romance became as bookish as
decadent Classicism, and ran into every kind of sentimental extravagance.
Indeed revived Romance also became a school of manners, and by making a
fashion and a code of rare emotions, debased the descriptive parts of the
language. A description by any professional reporter of any Royal
wedding is further from the truth to-day than it was in the eighteenth
century. The average writer is looser and more unprincipled.
The word Romance supplies no very valuable instrument of criticism even
in regard to the great writers of the early nineteenth century.
Wordsworth, like Defoe, drew straight from the life. Those who will may
call him a Romantic. He told of adventures--the adventures of the mind.
He did not write of Bacchus, Venus, and Apollo; neither did he concern
himself with Merlin, Tristram, and the Lady of the Lake. He shunned what
is derived from other books. His theme is man, nature, and human life.
Scott, in rich and careless fashion, dealt in every kind of material that
came his way. He described his own country and his own people with
loving care, and he loved also the melodrama of historical fiction and
supernatural legend. "His romance and antiquarianism," says Ruskin, "his
knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them to be false."
Certainly, _The Heart of Midlothian_ and _The Antiquary_ are better than
_Ivanhoe_. Scott's love for the knighthood and monkery was real, but it
was playful. His heart was with Fielding.
There is nothing inconsistent in the best of the traditions of the two
parties. The Classical school taught simplicity, directness, and modesty
of speech. They are right: it is the way to tell a ghost story. The
Romantic school taught a wider imaginative outlook and a more curious
analysis of the human mind. They also are right: it is the way to
investigate a case in the police courts. Both were cumbered, at times,
with the dead things that they found in the books they loved. All
literature, except the strongest and purest, is cumbered with useless
matter--the conventional epithet, the grandiose phrase, the outworn
classical quotation, the self-conscious apology, the time-honored joke.
But there are only two schools of literature--the good, and the bad. As
for national legend, its growth is the same in all ages. The Greeks told
tales of Achilles, the Romans of Aeneas, the French of Charlemagne, the
British of Arthur. It is a part of the same process, and an expression
of the same humanity.
I have tried to show that the Renaissance bears the same relation to
classical literature as the Revival of Romance bears to mediaeval
literature, and that the whole history of the literature of Europe is an
oscillation between Christian and Pagan ideals during that long and
wavering process whereby Christianity was partially established as the
creed and way of life of a group of diverse nations. The historical
meaning of the word Romance is exact and easy to define. But in common
usage the word means something much vaguer than this. It is a note, an
atmosphere, a kind of feeling that is awakened not only by literature but
by the behavior of men and the disposition of material objects. John
Evelyn, the diarist, enjoys the reputation of having been the first to
speak of a "romantic site,"--a phrase which leads the way to immeasurable
possibilities in the application of the word. Accuracy in the definition
of this larger meaning is unattainable; and would certainly be false, for
the word has taken its meaning from centuries of usage by inaccurate
thinkers. A whole cluster of feelings, impressions, and desires, dimly
recognized as cognate, has grown around the word, which has now been a
centre of critical discussion and controversy for the better part of a
century. Heine, in his dissertation on the Romantic School, takes the
Christianity of the Middle Ages as his starting-point, and relates
everything to that. Perhaps he makes too much of allegory and symbolism,
which have always been dear to the church, but are not conspicuous in
early Romance. Yet no one can go far astray who keeps in touch, as Heine
does, with the facts of history. Goethe, impatient of the wistful
intensities of youth, said that the Classical is health, and the Romantic
disease. Much has been made, by many critics, of the statue and the
picture, as types of ancient and modern art, the one complete in itself,
the other suggesting more than it portrays. Mr. Walter Pater, borrowing
a hint from a sentence of Bacon, finds the essence of Romance in the
addition of strangeness to beauty, of curiosity to desire. It would be
easy to multiply these epigrammatic statements, which are all not
obscurely related to the fundamental changes wrought on the world by
Christian ideas. No single formula can hope to describe and distinguish
two eras, or define two tempers of mind. If I had to choose a single
characteristic of Romance as the most noteworthy, I think I should choose
Distance, and should call Romance the magic of Distance. What is the
most romantic line in Virgil? Surely it is the line which describes the
ghosts, staying for waftage on the banks of the river, and stretching out
their hands in passionate desire to the further shore:
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
Scott expounds the harmonizing power of distance in his _Journal_, where
he describes the funeral of his friend Laidlaw's infant:
I saw the poor child's funeral from a distance. Ah, that Distance!
What a magician for conjuring up scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing
all asperities, reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness,
softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by the influence of
the imagination. A Scottish wedding should be seen at a distance; the
gay band of the dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of
the spectators,--the glass held high, and the distant cheers as it is
swallowed, should be only a sketch, not a finished Dutch picture, when
it becomes brutal and boorish. Scotch psalmody, too, should be heard
from a distance. The grunt and the snuffle, and the whine and the
scream, should be all blended in that deep and distant sound, which
rising and falling like the Eolian harp, may have some title to be
called the praise of our Maker. Even so the distant funeral: the few
mourners on horseback with their plaids wrapped around them--the
father heading the procession as they enter the river, and pointing
out the ford by which his darling is to be carried on the last long
road--not one of the subordinate figures in discord with the general
tone of the incident--seeming just accessories, and no more--this _is_
affecting.
The same idea is the subject of T. E. Brown's poem, _The Schooner_:
Just mark that schooner westward far at sea--
'Tis but an hour ago
When she was lying hoggish at the quay,
And men ran to and fro,
And tugged, and stamped, and shoved, and pushed and swore,
And ever and anon, with crapulous glee,
Grinned homage to viragoes on the shore.
* * * * *
And now, behold! a shadow of repose
Upon a line of gray,
She sleeps, that transverse cuts the evening rose--
She sleeps, and dreams away,
Soft blended in a unity of rest
All jars, and strifes obscene, and turbulent throes,
'Neath the broad benediction of the West.
Shelley finds the suggestion of distance in beautiful music:
Though the sound overpowers,
Sing again, with thy sweet voice revealing
A tone
Of some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.
Wordsworth hears it in the song of the Highland Girl:
Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.
These quotations are enough to show what a width of view is given to
modern Romantic poetry. Man is, in one sense, more truly seen in a wide
setting of the mountains and the sea than close at hand in the street.
But the romantic effect of distance may delude and conceal as well as
glorify and liberate. The weakness of the modern Romantic poet is that
he must keep himself aloof from life, that he may see it. He rejects the
authority, and many of the pleasures, along with the duties, of society.
He looks out from his window on the men fighting in the plain, and sees
them transfigured under the rays of the setting sun. He enjoys the
battle, but not as the fighters enjoy it. He nurses himself in all the
luxury of philosophic sensation. He does not help to bury the child, or
to navigate the schooner, or to discover the Fortunate Islands. The
business of every poet, it may be said, is vision, not action. But the
epic poet holds his reader fast by strong moral bonds of sympathy with
the actors in the poem. "I should have liked to do that" is what the
reader says to himself. He is asked to think and feel as a man, not as a
god.
The weakness of revived Romance found the most searching of its critics
in Tennyson, who was fascinated, when he was shaping his own poetic
career, by the picture and the past, yet could not feel satisfied with
the purely aesthetic attitude of art to life. In poem after poem he
returns to the question, Is poetry an escape from life? Must it lull the
soul in a selfish security? The struggle that went on in his mind has
left its mark on _The Lady of Shalott_, _The Palace of Art_, _The
Voyage_, _The Vision of Sin_, _The Lotos-Eaters_, and others of his
poems. The Lady of Shalott lives secluded in her bower, where she weaves
a magic web with gay colors. She has heard that a curse will fall on her
if she looks out on the world and down to the city of Camelot. She sees
the outer world only in a mirror, and
In her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights
--villages, market-girls, knights riding two and two, funerals, or pairs
of lovers wandering by. At last she grows half-sick of seeing the world
only in shadows and reflections. Then a sudden vivid experience breaks
up this life of dream. Sir Lancelot rides past, in shining armor,
singing as he rides. She leaves her magic web and mirror, and looks upon
the real world.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.
She goes into the world, and there she meets her death. The poem is not
an allegory, but there is no mistaking the thought that generated it. The
mirror and the web are the emblems of Romantic art. The feelings which
stir the heart to action, which spring to meet the occasion or the
object, are contrasted, in the poem, with the more pensive feelings which
are excited by the sight of the object in a mirror, and the suggestions
of color and design which are to be transferred to the embroidery. The
mirror is a true and subtle symbol. When Shakespeare treated the same
problem, he made King Richard II, the most romantically minded of all his
kings, call for a mirror. The thing that it is easiest for a man to see
in a mirror is himself; egotism in its many forms, self-pity,
self-cultivation, self-esteem, dogs Romanticism like its shadow. The
desire to be the spectator of your own life, to see yourself in all kinds
of heroic and pathetic attitudes, is the motive-power of Romantic poetry
in many of its later developments. Yet life must be arrested and
falsified before the desire can be fulfilled. No one has ever seen
himself in a mirror as he is seen by others. He cannot catch himself
looking away, self-forgetful, intent on something outward; yet only when
he is in these attitudes does his true character show itself in his face.
Nor, if he could so see himself, would he be a witness of the truth. The
sensation of drowning, or of leading an assault in war, is very unlike
the sentiment which is aroused in the spectator of either of these
adventures. Romanticism, in its decline, confuses the sentiment with the
sensation, and covets the enjoyment of life on the easy terms of a by-
stander.
These faults and failings of late Romance are far enough removed from the
simple heroism of the death of Roland in the pass of Roncesvalles. Later
Romance is known everywhere by its derivative, secondary, consciously
literary character. Yet it draws sometimes from the original source of
inspiration, and attains, by devious ways, to poetic glories not inferior
to the old.
IMITATION AND FORGERY