ainei de palaion men oinon, anthea d' hymnon neôterôn+
[241] THE words, classical and romantic, although, like many other
critical expressions, sometimes abused by those who have understood
them too vaguely or too absolutely, yet define two real tendencies in
the history of art and literature. Used in an exaggerated sense, to
express a greater opposition between those tendencies than really
exists, they have at times tended to divide people of taste into
opposite camps. But in that House Beautiful, which the creative minds
of all generations--the artists and those who have treated life in the
spirit of art--are always building together, for the refreshment of the
human spirit, these oppositions cease; and the Interpreter of the House
Beautiful, the true aesthetic critic, uses these divisions, only so far
as they enable him to enter into the peculiarities of the objects with
which he has to do. The term classical, fixed, as it is, to a
well-defined literature, and a well-defined group in art, is clear,
indeed; but then it has often been used in a hard, and merely
scholastic [242] sense, by the praisers of what is old and accustomed,
at the expense of what is new, by critics who would never have
discovered for themselves the charm of any work, whether new or old,
who value what is old, in art or literature, for its accessories, and
chiefly for the conventional authority that has gathered about
it--people who would never really have been made glad by any Venus
fresh-risen from the sea, and who praise the Venus of old Greece and
Rome, only because they fancy her grown now into something staid and
tame.
And as the term, classical, has been used in a too absolute, and
therefore in a misleading sense, so the term, romantic, has been used
much too vaguely, in various accidental senses. The sense in which
Scott is called a romantic writer is chiefly this; that, in opposition
to the literary tradition of the last century, he loved strange
adventure, and sought it in the Middle Age. Much later, in a Yorkshire
village, the spirit of romanticism bore a more really characteristic
fruit in the work of a young girl, Emily Brontë, the romance of
Wuthering Heights; the figures of Hareton Earnshaw, of Catherine
Linton, and of Heathcliffe--tearing open Catherine's grave, removing
one side of her coffin, that he may really lie beside her in
death--figures so passionate, yet woven on a background of delicately
beautiful, moorland scenery, being typical examples of that spirit. In
Germany, again, [243] that spirit is shown less in Tieck, its
professional representative, than in Meinhold, the author of Sidonia
the Sorceress and the Amber-Witch. In Germany and France, within the
last hundred years, the term has been used to describe a particular
school of writers; and, consequently, when Heine criticises the
Romantic School in Germany--that movement which culminated in Goethe's
Goetz von Berlichingen; or when Théophile Gautier criticises the
romantic movement in France, where, indeed, it bore its most
characteristic fruits, and its play is hardly yet over where, by a
certain audacity, or bizarrerie of motive, united with faultless
literary execution, it still shows itself in imaginative literature,
they use the word, with an exact sense of special artistic qualities,
indeed; but use it, nevertheless, with a limited application to the
manifestation of those qualities at a particular period. But the
romantic spirit is, in reality, an ever-present, an enduring principle,
in the artistic temperament; and the qualities of thought and style
which that, and other similar uses of the word romantic really
indicate, are indeed but symptoms of a very continuous and widely
working influence.
Though the words classical and romantic, then, have acquired an almost
technical meaning, in application to certain developments of German and
French taste, yet this is but one variation of an old opposition, which
may be traced from the [244] very beginning of the formation of
European art and literature. From the first formation of anything like
a standard of taste in these things, the restless curiosity of their
more eager lovers necessarily made itself felt, in the craving for new
motives, new subjects of interest, new modifications of style. Hence,
the opposition between the classicists and the romanticists--between
the adherents, in the culture of beauty, of the principles of liberty,
and authority, respectively--of strength, and order or what the Greeks
called kosmiotês.+
Sainte-Beuve, in the third volume of the Causeries du Lundi, has
discussed the question, What is meant by a classic? It was a question
he was well fitted to answer, having himself lived through many phases
of taste, and having been in earlier life an enthusiastic member of the
romantic school: he was also a great master of that sort of "philosophy
of literature," which delights in tracing traditions in it, and the way
in which various phases of thought and sentiment maintain themselves,
through successive modifications, from epoch to epoch. His aim, then,
is to give the word classic a wider and, as he says, a more generous
sense than it commonly bears, to make it expressly grandiose et
flottant; and, in doing this, he develops, in a masterly manner, those
qualities of measure, purity, temperance, of which it is the especial
function of classical art [245] and literature, whatever meaning,
narrower or wider, we attach to the term, to take care.
The charm, therefore, of what is classical, in art or literature, is
that of the well-known tale, to which we can, nevertheless, listen over
and over again, because it is told so well. To the absolute beauty of
its artistic form, is added the accidental, tranquil, charm of
familiarity. There are times, indeed, at which these charms fail to
work on our spirits at all, because they fail to excite us.
"Romanticism," says Stendhal, "is the art of presenting to people the
literary works which, in the actual state of their habits and beliefs,
are capable of giving them the greatest possible pleasure; classicism,
on the contrary, of presenting them with that which gave the greatest
possible pleasure to their grandfathers." But then, beneath all
changes of habits and beliefs, our love of that mere abstract
proportion--of music--which what is classical in literature possesses,
still maintains itself in the best of us, and what pleased our
grandparents may at least tranquillise us. The "classic" comes to us
out of the cool and quiet of other times; as the measure of what a long
experience has shown will at least never displease us. And in the
classical literature of Greece and Rome, as in the classics of the last
century, the essentially classical element is that quality of order in
beauty, which they possess, indeed, [246] in a pre-eminent degree, and
which impresses some minds to the exclusion of everything else in them.
It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the
romantic character in art; and the desire of beauty being a fixed
element in every artistic organisation, it is the addition of curiosity
to this desire of beauty, that constitutes the romantic temper.
Curiosity and the desire of beauty, have each their place in art, as in
all true criticism. When one's curiosity is deficient, when one is not
eager enough for new impressions, and new pleasures, one is liable to
value mere academical proprieties too highly, to be satisfied with
worn-out or conventional types, with the insipid ornament of Racine, or
the prettiness of that later Greek sculpture, which passed so long for
true Hellenic work; to miss those places where the handiwork of nature,
or of the artist, has been most cunning; to find the most stimulating
products of art a mere irritation. And when one's curiosity is in
excess, when it overbalances the desire of beauty, then one is liable
to value in works of art what is inartistic in them; to be satisfied
with what is exaggerated in art, with productions like some of those of
the romantic school in Germany; not to distinguish, jealously enough,
between what is admirably done, and what is done not quite so well, in
the writings, for instance, of Jean Paul. And if I had to give [247]
instances of these defects, then I should say, that Pope, in common
with the age of literature to which he belonged, had too little
curiosity, so that there is always a certain insipidity in the effect
of his work, exquisite as it is; and, coming down to our own time, that
Balzac had an excess of curiosity--curiosity not duly tempered with the
desire of beauty.
But, however falsely those two tendencies may be opposed by critics, or
exaggerated by artists themselves, they are tendencies really at work
at all times in art, moulding it, with the balance sometimes a little
on one side, sometimes a little on the other, generating, respectively,
as the balance inclines on this side or that, two principles, two
traditions, in art, and in literature so far as it partakes of the
spirit of art. If there is a great overbalance of curiosity, then, we
have the grotesque in art: if the union of strangeness and beauty,
under very difficult and complex conditions, be a successful one, if
the union be entire, then the resultant beauty is very exquisite, very
attractive. With a passionate care for beauty, the romantic spirit
refuses to have it, unless the condition of strangeness be first
fulfilled. Its desire is for a beauty born of unlikely elements, by a
profound alchemy, by a difficult initiation, by the charm which wrings
it even out of terrible things; and a trace of distortion, of the
grotesque, may perhaps linger, as an additional element of expression,
about its [248] ultimate grace. Its eager, excited spirit will have
strength, the grotesque, first of all--the trees shrieking as you tear
off the leaves; for Jean Valjean, the long years of convict life; for
Redgauntlet, the quicksands of Solway Moss; then, incorporate with this
strangeness, and intensified by restraint, as much sweetness, as much
beauty, as is compatible with that. Énergique, frais, et
dispos--these, according to Sainte-Beuve, are the characteristics of a
genuine classic--les ouvrages anciens ne sont pas classiques parce
qu'ils sont vieux, mais parce qu'ils sont énergiques, frais, et dispos.
Energy, freshness, intelligent and masterly disposition:--these are
characteristics of Victor Hugo when his alchemy is complete, in certain
figures, like Marius and Cosette, in certain scenes, like that in the
opening of Les Travailleurs de la Mer, where Déruchette writes the name
of Gilliatt in the snow, on Christmas morning; but always there is a
certain note of strangeness discernible there, as well.
The essential elements, then, of the romantic spirit are curiosity and
the love of beauty; and it is only as an illustration of these
qualities, that it seeks the Middle Age, because, in the over-charged
atmosphere of the Middle Age, there are unworked sources of romantic
effect, of a strange beauty, to be won, by strong imagination, out of
things unlikely or remote.
Few, probably, now read Madame de Staël's [249] De l'Allemagne, though
it has its interest, the interest which never quite fades out of work
really touched with the enthusiasm of the spiritual adventurer, the
pioneer in culture. It was published in 1810, to introduce to French
readers a new school of writers--the romantic school, from beyond the
Rhine; and it was followed, twenty-three years later, by Heine's
Romantische Schule, as at once a supplement and a correction. Both
these books, then, connect romanticism with Germany, with the names
especially of Goethe and Tieck; and, to many English readers, the idea
of romanticism is still inseparably connected with Germany--that
Germany which, in its quaint old towns, under the spire of Strasburg or
the towers of Heidelberg, was always listening in rapt inaction to the
melodious, fascinating voices of the Middle Age, and which, now that it
has got Strasburg back again, has, I suppose, almost ceased to exist.
But neither Germany, with its Goethe and Tieck, nor England, with its
Byron and Scott, is nearly so representative of the romantic temper as
France, with Murger, and Gautier, and Victor Hugo. It is in French
literature that its most characteristic expression is to be found; and
that, as most closely derivative, historically, from such peculiar
conditions, as ever reinforce it to the utmost.
For, although temperament has much to do with the generation of the
romantic spirit, and [250] although this spirit, with its curiosity,
its thirst for a curious beauty, may be always traceable in excellent
art (traceable even in Sophocles) yet still, in a limited sense, it may
be said to be a product of special epochs. Outbreaks of this spirit,
that is, come naturally with particular periods--times, when, in men's
approaches towards art and poetry, curiosity may be noticed to take the
lead, when men come to art and poetry, with a deep thirst for
intellectual excitement, after a long ennui, or in reaction against the
strain of outward, practical things: in the later Middle Age, for
instance; so that medieval poetry, centering in Dante, is often opposed
to Greek and Roman poetry, as romantic poetry to the classical. What
the romanticism of Dante is, may be estimated, if we compare the lines
in which Virgil describes the hazel-wood, from whose broken twigs flows
the blood of Polydorus, not without the expression of a real shudder at
the ghastly incident, with the whole canto of the Inferno, into which
Dante has expanded them, beautifying and softening it, meanwhile, by a
sentiment of profound pity. And it is especially in that period of
intellectual disturbance, immediately preceding Dante, amid which the
romance languages define themselves at last, that this temper is
manifested. Here, in the literature of Provence, the very name of
romanticism is stamped with its true signification: here we have indeed
a romantic world, grotesque [251] even, in the strength of its
passions, almost insane in its curious expression of them, drawing all
things into its sphere, making the birds, nay! lifeless things, its
voices and messengers, yet so penetrated with the desire for beauty and
sweetness, that it begets a wholly new species of poetry, in which the
Renaissance may be said to begin. The last century was pre-eminently a
classical age, an age in which, for art and literature, the element of
a comely order was in the ascendant; which, passing away, left a hard
battle to be fought between the classical and the romantic schools.
Yet, it is in the heart of this century, of Goldsmith and Stothard, of
Watteau and the Siècle de Louis XIV.--in one of its central, if not
most characteristic figures, in Rousseau--that the modern or French
romanticism really originates. But, what in the eighteenth century is
but an exceptional phenomenon, breaking through its fair reserve and
discretion only at rare intervals, is the habitual guise of the
nineteenth, breaking through it perpetually, with a feverishness, an
incomprehensible straining and excitement, which all experience to some
degree, but yearning also, in the genuine children of the romantic
school, to be énergique, frais, et dispos--for those qualities of
energy, freshness, comely order; and often, in Murger, in Gautier, in
Victor Hugo, for instance, with singular felicity attaining them.
It is in the terrible tragedy of Rousseau, in [252] fact, that French
romanticism, with much else, begins: reading his Confessions we seem
actually to assist at the birth of this new, strong spirit in the
French mind. The wildness which has shocked so many, and the
fascination which has influenced almost every one, in the squalid, yet
eloquent figure, we see and hear so clearly in that book, wandering
under the apple-blossoms and among the vines of Neuchâtel or Vevey
actually give it the quality of a very successful romantic invention.
His strangeness or distortion, his profound subjectivity, his
passionateness--the cor laceratum--Rousseau makes all men in love with
these. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai sus. Mais si je
ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre. "I am not made like any one
else I have ever known: yet, if I am not better, at least I am
different." These words, from the first page of the Confessions,
anticipate all the Werthers, Renés, Obermanns, of the last hundred
years. For Rousseau did but anticipate a trouble in the spirit of the
whole world; and thirty years afterwards, what in him was a
peculiarity, became part of the general consciousness. A storm was
coming: Rousseau, with others, felt it in the air, and they helped to
bring it down: they introduced a disturbing element into French
literature, then so trim and formal, like our own literature of the age
of Queen Anne.
In 1815 the storm had come and gone, but had left, in the spirit of
"young France," the [253] ennui of an immense disillusion. In the last
chapter of Edgar Quinet's Revolution Française, a work itself full of
irony, of disillusion, he distinguishes two books, Senancour's Obermann
and Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme, as characteristic of the
first decade of the present century. In those two books we detect
already the disease and the cure--in Obermann the irony, refined into a
plaintive philosophy of "indifference"--in Chateaubriand's Génie du
Christianisme, the refuge from a tarnished actual present, a present of
disillusion, into a world of strength and beauty in the Middle Age, as
at an earlier period--in René and Atala--into the free play of them in
savage life. It is to minds in this spiritual situation, weary of the
present, but yearning for the spectacle of beauty and strength, that
the works of French romanticism appeal. They set a positive value on
the intense, the exceptional; and a certain distortion is sometimes
noticeable in them, as in conceptions like Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, or
Gwynplaine, something of a terrible grotesque, of the macabre, as the
French themselves call it; though always combined with perfect literary
execution, as in Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse, or the scene of the
"maimed" burial-rites of the player, dead of the frost, in his
Capitaine Fracasse--true "flowers of the yew." It becomes grim humour
in Victor Hugo's combat of Gilliatt with the devil-fish, or the
incident, with all its ghastly comedy drawn [254] out at length, of the
great gun detached from its fastenings on shipboard, in
Quatre-Vingt-Trieze (perhaps the most terrible of all the accidents
that can happen by sea) and in the entire episode, in that book, of the
Convention. Not less surely does it reach a genuine pathos; for the
habit of noting and distinguishing one's own most intimate passages of
sentiment makes one sympathetic, begetting, as it must, the power of
entering, by all sorts of finer ways, into the intimate recesses of
other minds; so that pity is another quality of romanticism, both
Victor Hugo and Gautier being great lovers of animals, and charming
writers about them, and Murger being unrivalled in the pathos of his
Scènes de la Vie de Jeunesse. Penetrating so finely into all
situations which appeal to pity, above all, into the special or
exceptional phases of such feeling, the romantic humour is not afraid
of the quaintness or singularity of its circumstances or expression,
pity, indeed, being of the essence of humour; so that Victor Hugo does
but turn his romanticism into practice, in his hunger and thirst after
practical Justice!--a justice which shall no longer wrong children, or
animals, for instance, by ignoring in a stupid, mere breadth of view,
minute facts about them. Yet the romanticists are antinomian, too,
sometimes, because the love of energy and beauty, of distinction in
passion, tended naturally to become a little bizarre, plunging into the
[255] Middle Age, into the secrets of old Italian story. Are we in the
Inferno?--we are tempted to ask, wondering at something malign in so
much beauty. For over all a care for the refreshment of the human
spirit by fine art manifests itself, a predominant sense of literary
charm, so that, in their search for the secret of exquisite expression,
the romantic school went back to the forgotten world of early French
poetry, and literature itself became the most delicate of the
arts--like "goldsmith's work," says Sainte-Beuve, of Bertrand's Gaspard
de la Nuit--and that peculiarly French gift, the gift of exquisite
speech, argute loqui, attained in them a perfection which it had never
seen before.
Stendhal, a writer whom I have already quoted, and of whom English
readers might well know much more than they do, stands between the
earlier and later growths of the romantic spirit. His novels are rich
in romantic quality; and his other writings--partly criticism, partly
personal reminiscences--are a very curious and interesting illustration
of the needs out of which romanticism arose. In his book on Racine and
Shakespeare, Stendhal argues that all good art was romantic in its day;
and this is perhaps true in Stendhal's sense. That little treatise,
full of "dry light" and fertile ideas, was published in the year 1823,
and its object is to defend an entire independence and liberty in the
choice and treatment of subject, both in [256] art and literature,
against those who upheld the exclusive authority of precedent. In
pleading the cause of romanticism, therefore, it is the novelty, both
of form and of motive, in writings like the Hernani of Victor Hugo
(which soon followed it, raising a storm of criticism) that he is
chiefly concerned to justify. To be interesting and really
stimulating, to keep us from yawning even, art and literature must
follow the subtle movements of that nimbly-shifting Time-Spirit, or
Zeit-Geist, understood by French not less than by German criticism,
which is always modifying men's taste, as it modifies their manners and
their pleasures. This, he contends, is what all great workmen had
always understood. Dante, Shakespeare, Molière, had exercised an
absolute independence in their choice of subject and treatment. To
turn always with that ever-changing spirit, yet to retain the flavour
of what was admirably done in past generations, in the classics, as we
say--is the problem of true romanticism. "Dante," he observes, "was
pre-eminently the romantic poet. He adored Virgil, yet he wrote the
Divine Comedy, with the episode of Ugolino, which is as unlike the
Aeneid as can possibly be. And those who thus obey the fundamental
principle of romanticism, one by one become classical, and are joined
to that ever-increasing common league, formed by men of all countries,
to approach nearer and nearer to perfection."
Romanticism, then, although it has its epochs, [257] is in its
essential characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at all
times, in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, and
the amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one by one,
than the peculiarity of a time or a school. Depending on the varying
proportion of curiosity and the desire of beauty, natural tendencies of
the artistic spirit at all times, it must always be partly a matter of
individual temperament. The eighteenth century in England has been
regarded as almost exclusively a classical period; yet William Blake, a
type of so much which breaks through what are conventionally thought
the influences of that century, is still a noticeable phenomenon in it,
and the reaction in favour of naturalism in poetry begins in that
century, early. There are, thus, the born romanticists and the born
classicists. There are the born classicists who start with form, to
whose minds the comeliness of the old, immemorial, well-recognised
types in art and literature, have revealed themselves impressively; who
will entertain no matter which will not go easily and flexibly into
them; whose work aspires only to be a variation upon, or study from,
the older masters. "'Tis art's decline, my son!" they are always
saying, to the progressive element in their own generation; to those
who care for that which in fifty years' time every one will be caring
for. On the other hand, there are the born romanticists, who start
with an original, [258] untried matter, still in fusion; who conceive
this vividly, and hold by it as the essence of their work; who, by the
very vividness and heat of their conception, purge away, sooner or
later, all that is not organically appropriate to it, till the whole
effect adjusts itself in clear, orderly, proportionate form; which
form, after a very little time, becomes classical in its turn.
The romantic or classical character of a picture, a poem, a literary
work, depends, then, on the balance of certain qualities in it; and in
this sense, a very real distinction may be drawn between good classical
and good romantic work. But all critical terms are relative; and there
is at least a valuable suggestion in that theory of Stendhal's, that
all good art was romantic in its day. In the beauties of Homer and
Pheidias, quiet as they now seem, there must have been, for those who
confronted them for the first time, excitement and surprise, the
sudden, unforeseen satisfaction of the desire of beauty. Yet the
Odyssey, with its marvellous adventure, is more romantic than the
Iliad, which nevertheless contains, among many other romantic episodes,
that of the immortal horses of Achilles, who weep at the death of
Patroclus. Aeschylus is more romantic than Sophocles, whose
Philoctetes, were it written now, might figure, for the strangeness of
its motive and the perfectness of its execution, as typically romantic;
while, of Euripides, it may be said, that his method in [259] writing
his plays is to sacrifice readily almost everything else, so that he
may attain the fulness of a single romantic effect. These two
tendencies, indeed, might be applied as a measure or standard, all
through Greek and Roman art and poetry, with very illuminating results;
and for an analyst of the romantic principle in art, no exercise would
be more profitable, than to walk through the collection of classical
antiquities at the Louvre, or the British Museum, or to examine some
representative collection of Greek coins, and note how the element of
curiosity, of the love of strangeness, insinuates itself into classical
design, and record the effects of the romantic spirit there, the traces
of struggle, of the grotesque even, though over-balanced here by
sweetness; as in the sculpture of Chartres and Rheims, the real
sweetness of mind in the sculptor is often overbalanced by the
grotesque, by the rudeness of his strength.
Classicism, then, means for Stendhal, for that younger enthusiastic
band of French writers whose unconscious method he formulated into
principles, the reign of what is pedantic, conventional, and narrowly
academical in art; for him, all good art is romantic. To Sainte-Beuve,
who understands the term in a more liberal sense, it is the
characteristic of certain epochs, of certain spirits in every epoch,
not given to the exercise of original imagination, but rather to the
working out of refinements of manner on some [260] authorised matter;
and who bring to their perfection, in this way, the elements of sanity,
of order and beauty in manner. In general criticism, again, it means
the spirit of Greece and Rome, of some phases in literature and art
that may seem of equal authority with Greece and Rome, the age of Louis
the Fourteenth, the age of Johnson; though this is at best an
uncritical use of the term, because in Greek and Roman work there are
typical examples of the romantic spirit. But explain the terms as we
may, in application to particular epochs, there are these two elements
always recognisable; united in perfect art--in Sophocles, in Dante, in
the highest work of Goethe, though not always absolutely balanced
there; and these two elements may be not inappropriately termed the
classical and romantic tendencies.
Material for the artist, motives of inspiration, are not yet exhausted:
our curious, complex, aspiring age still abounds in subjects for
aesthetic manipulation by the literary as well as by other forms of
art. For the literary art, at all events, the problem just now is, to
induce order upon the contorted, proportionless accumulation of our
knowledge and experience, our science and history, our hopes and
disillusion, and, in effecting this, to do consciously what has been
done hitherto for the most part too unconsciously, to write our English
language as the Latins wrote theirs, as the [261] French write, as
scholars should write. Appealing, as he may, to precedent in this
matter, the scholar will still remember that if "the style is the man"
it is also the age: that the nineteenth century too will be found to
have had its style, justified by necessity--a style very different,
alike from the baldness of an impossible "Queen Anne" revival, and an
incorrect, incondite exuberance, after the mode of Elizabeth: that we
can only return to either at the price of an impoverishment of form or
matter, or both, although, an intellectually rich age such as ours
being necessarily an eclectic one, we may well cultivate some of the
excellences of literary types so different as those: that in literature
as in other matters it is well to unite as many diverse elements as may
be: that the individual writer or artist, certainly, is to be estimated
by the number of graces he combines, and his power of interpenetrating
them in a given work. To discriminate schools, of art, of literature,
is, of course, part of the obvious business of literary criticism: but,
in the work of literary production, it is easy to be overmuch occupied
concerning them. For, in truth, the legitimate contention is, not of
one age or school of literary art against another, but of all
successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the
substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form.