A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century | Page 2

at least,
What is, or was English romanticism?--is one of my main purposes
herein, and the reader will be invited to examine a good many literary
documents, and to do a certain amount of thinking, before he can form
for himself any full and clear notion of the thing. Even then he will
hardly find himself prepared to give a dictionary definition or
romanticism. There are words which connote so much, which take up
into themselves so much of the history of the human mind, that any
compendious explanation of their meaning--any definition which is not,
at the same time, a rather extended description--must serve little other
end than to supply a convenient mark of identification. How can we
define in a sentence words like renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism,
transcendental, Bohemia, pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic?
Definitio est negatio. It may be possible to hit upon a form of words
which will mark romanticism off from everything else--tell in a clause

what it is _not_; but to add a positive content to the definition--to tell
what romanticism is, will require a very different and more gradual
process.[1]
Nevertheless a rough, working definition may be useful to start with.
Romanticism, then, in the sense in which I shall commonly employ the
word, means the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and
thought of the Middle Ages. Some other elements will have to be added
to this definition, and some modifications of it will suggest themselves
from time to time. It is provisional, tentative, classic, but will serve our
turn till we are ready to substitute a better. It is the definition which
Heine gives in his brilliant little book on the Romantic School in
Germany.[2] "All the poetry of the Middle Ages," he adds, "has a
certain definite character, through which it differs from the poetry of
the Greeks and Romans. In reference to this difference, the former is
called Romantic, the latter Classic. These names, however, are
misleading, and have hitherto caused the most vexatious confusion."[3]
Some of the sources of this confusion will be considered presently.
Meanwhile the passage recalls the fact that romantic, when used as a
term in literary nomenclature, is not an independent, but a referential
word. It implies its opposite, the classic; and the ingenuity of critics has
been taxed to its uttermost to explain and develop the numerous points
of contrast. To form a thorough conception of the romantic, therefore,
we must also form some conception of the classic. Now there is an
obvious unlikeness between the thought and art of the nations of pagan
antiquity and the thought and art of the peoples of Christian, feudal
Europe. Everyone will agree to call the Parthenon, the "Diana" of the
Louvre, the "Oedipus" of Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes
classical; and to call the cathedral of Chartres, the walls of
Nuremberg--_die Perle des Mittelalters_--the "Legenda Aurea" of
Jacobus de Voragine, the "Tristan und Isolde" of Gottfried of Strasburg,
and the illuminations in a Catholic missal of the thirteenth century
romantic.
The same unlikeness is found between modern works conceived in the
spirit, or executed in direct imitation, of ancient and medieval art

respectively. It is easy to decide that Flaxman's outline drawings in
illustration of Homer are classic; that Alfieri's tragedies, Goethe's
"Iphigenie auf Tauris" Landor's "Hellenics," Gibson's statues, David's
paintings, and the church of the Madeleine in Paris are classical, at least
in intentions and in the models which they follow; while Victor Hugo's
"Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's "Ivanhoe," Fouqué's "Der Zauberring,"
and Rossetti's painting, "The Girlhood of Mary," are no less certainly
romantic in their inspiration.
But critics have given a wider extension than this to the terms classic
and romantic. They have discerned, or imagined, certain qualities,
attitudes of mind, ways of thinking and feeling, traits of style which
distinguish classic from romantic art; and they have applied the words
accordingly to work which is not necessarily either antique or medieval
in subject. Thus it is assumed, for example, that the productions of
Greek and Roman genius were characterized by clearness, simplicity,
restraint, unity of design, subordination of the part to the whole; and
therefore modern works which make this impression of noble plainness
and severity, of harmony in construction, economy of means and clear,
definite outline, are often spoken of as classical, quite irrespective of
the historical period which they have to do with. In this sense, it is
usual to say that Wordsworth's "Michael" is classical, or that Goethe's
"Hermann and Dorothea" is classical; though Wordsworth may be
celebrating the virtues of a Westmoreland shepherd, and Goethe telling
the story of two rustic lovers on the German border at the time of the
Napoleonic wars.
On the other hand, it is asserted that the work of mediaeval poets and
artists is