A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century | Page 6

famous saying
that the genius of the antique drama was statuesque, and that of the
romantic drama picturesque. A Greek temple, statue, or poem has no

imperfection and offers no further promise, indicates nothing beyond
what it expresses. It fills the sense, it leaves nothing to the imagination.
It stands correct, symmetric, sharp in outline, in the clear light of day.
There is nothing more to be done to it; there is no concealment about it.
But in romantic art there is seldom this completeness. The workman
lingers, he would fain add another touch, his ideal eludes him. Is a
Gothic cathedral ever really finished? Is "Faust" finished? Is "Hamlet"
explained? The modern spirit is mystical; its architecture, painting,
poetry employ shadow to produce their highest effects: shadow and
color rather than contour. On the Greek heroic stage there were a few
figures, two or three at most, grouped like statuary and thrown out in
bold relief at the apex of the scene: in Greek architecture a few clean,
simple lines: in Greek poetry clear conceptions easily expressible in
language and mostly describable in sensuous images.
The modern theater is crowded with figures and colors, and the
distance recedes in the middle of the scene. This love of perspective is
repeated in cathedral aisles,[14] the love of color in cathedral windows,
and obscurity hovers in the shadows of the vault. In our poetry, in our
religion these twilight thoughts prevail. We seek no completeness here.
What is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us. Hence the greater
spirituality of romantic literature, its deeper emotion, its more
passionate tenderness. But hence likewise its sentimentality, its
melancholy and, in particular, the morbid fascination which the thought
of death has had for the Gothic mind. The classic nations concentrated
their attention on life and light, and spent few thoughts upon darkness
and the tomb. Death was to them neither sacred nor beautiful. Their
decent rites of sepulture or cremation seem designed to hide its
deformities rather than to prolong its reminders. The presence of the
corpse was pollution. No Greek could have conceived such a book as
the "Hydriotaphia" or the "Anatomy of Melancholy."
It is observable that Dr. Hedge is at one with Pater, in desiring some
more philosophical statement of the difference between classic and
romantic than the common one which makes it simply the difference
between the antique and the medieval. He says: "It must not be
supposed that ancient and classic, on one side, and modern and

romantic, on the other, are inseparably one; so that nothing approaching
to romantic shall be found in any Greek or Roman author, nor any
classic page in the literature of modern Europe. . . The literary line of
demarcation is not identical with the chronological one." And just as
Pater says that the Odyssey is more romantic than the Iliad, so Dr.
Hedge says that "the story of Cupid and Psyche,[15] in the 'Golden Ass'
of Apuleius, is as much a romance as any composition of the
seventeenth or eighteenth century." Medievalism he regards as merely
an accident of romance: Scott, as most romantic in his themes, but
Byron, in his mood.
So, too, Mr. Sidney Colvin[16] denies that "a predilection for classic
subjects . . . can make a writer that which we understand by the word
classical as distinguished from that which we understand by the word
romantic. The distinction lies deeper, and is a distinction much less of
subject than of treatment. . . In classical writing every idea is called up
to the mind as nakedly as possible, and at the same time as distinctly; it
is exhibited in white light, and left to produce its effect by its own
unaided power.[17] In romantic writing, on the other hand, all objects
are exhibited, as it were, through a colored and iridescent atmosphere.
Round about every central idea the romantic writer summons up a
cloud of accessory and subordinate ideas for the sake of enhancing its
effect, if at the risk of confusing its outlines. The temper, again, of the
romantic writer is one of excitement, while the temper of the classical
writer is one of self-possession. . . On the one hand there is calm, on
the other hand enthusiasm. The virtues of the one style are strength of
grasp, with clearness and justice of presentment; the virtues of the other
style are glow of the spirit, with magic and richness of suggestion." Mr.
Colvin then goes on to enforce and illustrate this contrast between the
"accurate and firm definition of things" in classical writers and the
"thrilling vagueness and uncertainty," the tremulous, coruscating,
vibrating or colored light--the "halo"--with which the romantic writer
invests his theme. "The romantic manner, . . . with its thrilling
uncertainties and its rich suggestions, may