A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century | Page 3

marked by an excess of sentiment, by over-lavish decoration, a
strong sense of color and a feeble sense of form, an attention to detail,
at the cost of the main impression, and a consequent tendency to run
into the exaggerated, the fantastic, and the grotesque. It is not
uncommon, therefore, to find poets like Byron and Shelly classified as
romanticists, by virtue of their possession of these, or similar,
characteristics, although no one could be more remote from medieval
habits of thought than the author of "Don Juan" or the author of "The
Revolt of Islam."

But the extension of these opposing terms to the work of writers who
have so little in common with either the antique or the medieval as
Wordsworth, on the one hand, and Byron, on the other, does not stop
here. It is one of the embarrassments of the literary historian that nearly
every word which he uses has two meanings, a critical and a popular
meaning. In common speech, classic has come to signify almost
anything that is good. If we look in our dictionaries we find it defined
somewhat in this way: "Conforming to the best authority in literature
and art; pure; chaste; refined; originally and chiefly used of the best
Greek and Roman writers, but also applied to the best modern authors,
or their works." "Classic, _n._ A work of acknowledged excellence and
authority." In this sense of the word, "Robinson Crusoe" is a classic;
the "Pilgrim's Progress" is a classic; every piece of literature which is
customarily recommended as a safe pattern for young writers to form
their style upon is a classic.[4]
Contrariwise the word romantic, as popularly employed, expresses a
shade of disapprobation. The dictionaries make it a synonym for
_sentimental, fanciful_, wild, extravagant, chimerical, all evident
derivatives from their more critical definition, "pertaining or
appropriate to the style of the Christian and popular literature of the
Middle Ages, as opposed to the classical antique." The etymology of
romance is familiar. The various dialects which sprang from the
corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of romans.
The name was then applied to any piece of literature composed in this
vernacular instead of in the ancient classical Latin. And as the favorite
kind of writing in Provençal, Old French, and Spanish was the tale of
chivalrous adventure that was called par excellence, a roman, romans,
or_ romance_. The adjective romantic is much later, implying, as it
does, a certain degree of critical attention to the species of fiction which
it describes in order to a generalizing of its peculiarities. It first came
into general use in the latter half of the seventeenth century and the
early years of the eighteenth; and naturally, was marked from birth with
that shade of disapproval which has been noticed in popular usage.
The feature that struck the critics most in the romances of the Middle
Ages, and in that very different variety of romance which was

cultivated during the seventeenth century--the prolix, sentimental
fictions of La Calprenède, Scudéri, Gomberville, and D'Urfé--was the
fantastic improbability of their adventures. Hence the common
acceptation of the word romantic in such phrases as "a romantic
notion," "a romantic elopement," "an act of romantic generosity." The
application of the adjective to scenery was somewhat later,[5] and the
abstract romanticism was, of course, very much later; as the literary
movement, or the revolution in taste, which it entitles, was not enough
developed to call for a name until the opening of the nineteenth century.
Indeed, it was never so compact, conscious, and definite a movement in
England as in Germany and France; and its baptism doubtless came
from abroad, from the polemical literature which attended the career of
the German _romanticismus _and the French romantisme.
While accepting provisionally Heine's definition, it will be useful to
examine some of the wider meanings that have been attached to the
words classic and romantic, and some of the analyses that have been
attempted of the qualities that make one work of art classical and
another romantic. Walter Pater took them to indicate opposite
tendencies or elements which are present in varying proportions in all
good art. It is the essential function of classical art and literature, he
thought, to take care of the qualities of measure, purity, temperance.
"What is classical comes to us out of the cool and quiet of other times,
as a measure of what a long experience has shown us will, at least,
never displease us. And in the classical literature of Greece and Rome,
as in the classics of the last century, the essentially classical element is
that quality of order in beauty which they possess, indeed, in a
pre-eminent degree."[6] "The charm, then, of what is classical in art or
literature is that of the