Romance

Romance, by Walter Raleigh

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Title: Romance Two Lectures
Author: Walter Raleigh

Release Date: September 25, 2006 [eBook #19367]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
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ROMANCE***

Transcribed from the 1916 Princeton University Press edition by David
Price, email [email protected]
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is that the theory may very easily be superseded, or may prove to be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