Romance | Page 9

also are right: it is the way to
investigate a case in the police courts. Both were cumbered, at times,
with the dead things that they found in the books they loved. All
literature, except the strongest and purest, is cumbered with useless
matter--the conventional epithet, the grandiose phrase, the outworn
classical quotation, the self-conscious apology, the time-honored joke.
But there are only two schools of literature--the good, and the bad. As
for national legend, its growth is the same in all ages. The Greeks told
tales of Achilles, the Romans of Aeneas, the French of Charlemagne,
the British of Arthur. It is a part of the same process, and an expression
of the same humanity.
I have tried to show that the Renaissance bears the same relation to
classical literature as the Revival of Romance bears to mediaeval
literature, and that the whole history of the literature of Europe is an
oscillation between Christian and Pagan ideals during that long and
wavering process whereby Christianity was partially established as the
creed and way of life of a group of diverse nations. The historical
meaning of the word Romance is exact and easy to define. But in
common usage the word means something much vaguer than this. It is
a note, an atmosphere, a kind of feeling that is awakened not only by
literature but by the behavior of men and the disposition of material
objects. John Evelyn, the diarist, enjoys the reputation of having been
the first to speak of a "romantic site,"--a phrase which leads the way to
immeasurable possibilities in the application of the word. Accuracy in
the definition of this larger meaning is unattainable; and would
certainly be false, for the word has taken its meaning from centuries of
usage by inaccurate thinkers. A whole cluster of feelings, impressions,
and desires, dimly recognized as cognate, has grown around the word,
which has now been a centre of critical discussion and controversy for
the better part of a century. Heine, in his dissertation on the Romantic
School, takes the Christianity of the Middle Ages as his starting-point,
and relates everything to that. Perhaps he makes too much of allegory

and symbolism, which have always been dear to the church, but are not
conspicuous in early Romance. Yet no one can go far astray who keeps
in touch, as Heine does, with the facts of history. Goethe, impatient of
the wistful intensities of youth, said that the Classical is health, and the
Romantic disease. Much has been made, by many critics, of the statue
and the picture, as types of ancient and modern art, the one complete in
itself, the other suggesting more than it portrays. Mr. Walter Pater,
borrowing a hint from a sentence of Bacon, finds the essence of
Romance in the addition of strangeness to beauty, of curiosity to desire.
It would be easy to multiply these epigrammatic statements, which are
all not obscurely related to the fundamental changes wrought on the
world by Christian ideas. No single formula can hope to describe and
distinguish two eras, or define two tempers of mind. If I had to choose
a single characteristic of Romance as the most noteworthy, I think I
should choose Distance, and should call Romance the magic of
Distance. What is the most romantic line in Virgil? Surely it is the line
which describes the ghosts, staying for waftage on the banks of the
river, and stretching out their hands in passionate desire to the further
shore:
Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
Scott expounds the harmonizing power of distance in his Journal,
where he describes the funeral of his friend Laidlaw's infant:
I saw the poor child's funeral from a distance. Ah, that Distance! What
a magician for conjuring up scenes of joy or sorrow, smoothing all
asperities, reconciling all incongruities, veiling all absurdness,
softening every coarseness, doubling every effect by the influence of
the imagination. A Scottish wedding should be seen at a distance; the
gay band of the dancers just distinguished amid the elderly group of the
spectators,--the glass held high, and the distant cheers as it is
swallowed, should be only a sketch, not a finished Dutch picture, when
it becomes brutal and boorish. Scotch psalmody, too, should be heard
from a distance. The grunt and the snuffle, and the whine and the
scream, should be all blended in that deep and distant sound, which
rising and falling like the Eolian harp, may have some title to be called

the praise of our Maker. Even so the distant funeral: the few mourners
on horseback with their plaids wrapped around them--the father
heading the procession as they enter the river, and pointing out the ford
by which his darling is to be carried on the last long road--not one of
the subordinate figures