Classic and Romantic

TOWARD the close of the eighteenth century there appeared in Germany, under the lead of Tieck, Novalis, and the Schlegels, a class of writers and of writings known as the Romantic School.

The appellation gave rise to wide discussion of what, precisely, is meant by that phrase, and what distinguishes “ romantic ” from “ classic ” to which it is opposed. Goethe characterized the difference as equivalent to healthy and morbid. Schiller proposed “ naive and sentimental.” The greater part regarded it as identical with the difference between ancient and modern, which was partly true,but explained nothing. None of the definitions given could be accepted as quite satisfactory.

What do we mean by “ romantic ” ? The word, as we know, is derived from the old Romanic or Romance languages which formed, in mediæval times, the transition from the Latin to the dialects of modern Southern Europe. The invaders of Italy found a patois called Romana rustica, thus distinguished from the pure Latin of the cultivated Roman. Romance is a fusion of this Romana rustica with the native speech of barbarous tribes. It attained its most perfect development in Southern France, in the country of Provence, where it became the langue d’oc ; that is, the language in which “ yes ” is oc (German auch), while, in the Romance of Northern France, “yes” is oil, in modern French oui.

Poems and tales in the Romance language took the name Romàn, in English, “ romance ” or “ romaunt.”

Originally, then, “ romantic ” meant simply writings in the Romance language as distinguished from writings in the Latin tongue, the better sort of which were called classic, from classici, that is, first-class.

But the difference was not one of language merely. There was manifest in those Romance compositions, as compared with the classic, a difference of tone, of spirit, and even of subject matter, which has given to the term “ romantic ” a far wider significance than that of literary classification. We speak of romantic characters, romantic situations, romantic scenery. What do we mean by this expression ? Something very subtle, undefinable, but felt by all. If we analyze the feeling we shall find, I think, that it has its origin in wonder and mystery. It is the sense of something hidden, of imperfect revelation. The woody dell, the leafy glen, the forest path which leads one knows not whither, are romantic; the public highway is not. Moonlight is romantic as contrasted with daylight. The winding, secret brook, “ old as the hills that feed it from afar,” is romantic as compared with the broad river rolling through level banks.

The essence of romance is mystery. But now a further question. What caused the Romance writings more than the classic to take on this charm of mystery ? Something perhaps is due to the influence on the writers of sylvan surroundings, of wild nature, as contrasted with the civic life which seems to have been the lot of the Latin classic authors. But mainly it was the influence of the Christian religion, which deepened immensely the mystery of life, suggesting something beyond and behind the world of sense.

The word “ classic ” is more commonly employed in the sense of style. It denotes the manner of treatment irrespective of the topic. The peculiarity of the classic style is reserve, self-suppression of the writer. The romantic is self-reflecting. In the one the writer stands aloof from his theme, in the other he pervades it. The classic treatment draws attention to the matter in hand, the romantic to the hand in the matter. The classic is passionless presentation, the romantic is impassioned demonstration. The classic narrator tells his story without comment; the romantic colors it with his reflections, and criticises while he narrates.

“ Homer,” says Landor, “ is subject to none of the passions, but he sends them all forth on their errands with as much precision as Apollo his golden arrows. The hostile gods, the very Fates, must have wept with Priam before the tent of Achilles; Homer stands unmoved.”

Schiller draws a parallel between Homer and Ariosto in their treatment of the same subject, an agreement between two enemies. In the Iliad, Glaucus and Diomed, a Trojan and a Greek, encountering each other in battle, and discovering that they are mutually related by the binding law of hospitality, agree to avoid each other in the fight, and in token thereof exchange with each other their suits of armor. Glaucus, without hesitation, gives his gold suit worth a hundred oxen for Diomed’s steel suit worth nine. Schiller thinks that a modern poet would have expatiated on the moral beauty of such an act, but Homer simply states it without note or comment. Ariosto, on the other hand, having related how two knights who were rivals, a Christian and a Saracen, after mauling each other in a hand-to-hand combat, make peace and mount the same steed to pursue the fugitive Angelica, in whom both are interested, breaks forth in admiring praise of the magnanimity of ancient knighthood : —

There is no better illustration of the reserve, the passionless transparency and naïveté, of the classic style of narrative than that which is given us in the Acts of the Apostles; not the work of a recognized classic author, but beautifully classic in its pure objectivity, its absence of personal coloring. In that wonderful narrative of Paul’s shipwreck the narrator closes his account of an anxious night with these words : “ Then fearing lest they should have fallen upon rocks, they cast four anchors out of the stern, and wished for the day.” Fancy a modern writer dealing with such a theme ! How he would enlarge on the racking suspense, the tortures of expectation, endured by the storm-tossed company through the weary hours of a night which threatened instant destruction ! How he would dwell on the momentary dread of the shock which should shatter the frail bark and engulf the devoted crew, the angry billows hungering for their prey, eyes strained to catch the first glimmer of returning light, etc.! All which the writer of the Acts conveys in the single phrase, " And wished for the day.”

Clear, unimpassioned, impartial presentation of the subject, whether fact or fiction, whether done in prose or verse, is the prominent feature of the classic style. The modern writer gives you not so much the things themselves as his impression of them. You are compelled to see them through his eyes: that is, through his feelings and reflections. The ancients present them in their own light, without coloring. They would seem to have possessed other powers of seeing than the modern, who, as Jean Paul says, stands with an intellectual spyglass behind his own eyes. Certainly they possessed the art of so placing their object as not to have their own shadow fall upon it.

The difference is especially noticeable in poetry, where each style unfolds itself more fully and both are perfected in their several kinds. Ancient poetry is characterized by sharp delineations of individual objects, modern poetry by the color it gives to things and the sentiments it associates with them.

The healthy nature of the ancients cared little for anything beyond the visible world in which they moved. The finer their organization, the clearer the impressions which they received from surrounding objects. The modern, estranged from nature, is thrown back upon himself; the finer his organization, the more feelingly he is affected by his environment. The ancient lived more in phenomena, the modern more in thought. Hence, as Schiller says, classic poetry affects us through the medium of facts, romantic through the medium of ideas.

In the thought of the ancients — I speak particularly of the Greeks —soul and body, spiritual and material, were not divided, but blended, fused, in one consciousness, one nature, one man. This identity of matter and mind which they realized in their life is expressed in all the creations of Grecian art.

For us moderns this harmony is lost. The beautiful equilibrium of matter and spirit is destroyed. We are divided within ourselves, our nature is rent in twain. We have discovered that we exist. We are become aware of spirit, and like children of a larger growth would pick the world to pieces to find where it hides. To the Greeks the world was a fact, to us it is a problem. Where they accepted, we analyze; where they rested, we challenge and dispute; where they lost themselves in contemplation, we seek ourselves in reflection; where they dreamed, we dream that we dream. They enjoyed the ideal in the actual; we seek it apart from the actual, in the vague inane.

It must not, however, 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. What has been said is to be understood as indicating only the prevailing characteristics, respectively, of the earlier and the latter ages.

Moreover, the word " ancient ” is not intended to include all writers of Greek and Latin. The literary line of demarkation is not identical with the chronological one which divides the old world from mediæval time. On the contrary, the pagan writers of the postAugustan age of Latin literature have much in common with the modern. The story of Cupid and Psyche, in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, is as much a romance as any composition of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The Letters of the younger Pliny and the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius have very little of the savor of antiquity. The exquisite poem of the last-named writer, which gives the psychology of a kiss, beginning with,

is intensely modern. Even Tacitus, as a historiographer, is reflective, and so far modern, as compared with Livy. Of Greek writers, also, Lucian and Plutarch, — especially the former, — if classic in style, are modern in spirit.

On the other hand, Dante and Milton are classic in their objective particularity of presentment. Dante, in his vision of Malebolge, where public peculators are punished by being plunged in a lake of boiling pitch, gives a Homeric description of the Venetian dockyard where boiling pitch was used for the repair of vessels.

Milton is not satisfied with comparing a warrior’s shield to the full moon, as other poets have done, but Homerlike adds:—

Ancient and modern are not more sharply contrasted than are Gibbon and Carlyle as historiographers. Mark the calm, impersonal style in which Gibbon recounts the horrible slaughter of the family of the Emperor Maurice by the decree and in the presence of the usurper Phocas : “ The ministers of death were dispatched to Chalcedon ; they dragged the emperor from his sanctuary, and the five sons of Maurice were successively murdered before the eyes of their agonizing parent. At each stroke which he felt in his heart he found strength to rehearse a pious ejaculation. . . . The tragic scene was finally closed by the execution of the emperor himself, in the twentieth year of his reign and the sixty-third of his age.” Compare this with Carlyle’s account of the slaughter of Princess Lamballe: “She too is led to the hell-gate, a manifest Queen’s friend. She shivers back at the sight of the bloody sabres, but there is no return. Onwards ! That fair hindhead is cleft with the axe, the neck is severed. That fair body is cut in fragments. . . . She was beautiful, she was good ; she had known no happiness. Young hearts, generation after generation, will think with themselves: ‘O worthy of worship, thou king-descended, God-descended, and poor sister woman ! Why was not I there, and some sword Balmung or Thor’s hammer in my hand ? ’ ”

Modern English poets from Cowper on, with few exceptions, are strictly romantic compared with their immediate predecessors. Most romantic of all, Scott in his themes and Byron in his mood.

Among prose writers romanticism has reached its climax in recent novelists as shown in their attempted descriptions of scenery, particularly sky scenery. The elder novelists, from Richardson to Scott, attempted nothing of the sort. They describe persons and scenes, but not scenery in the commonly received sense of the word. Even Scott is sparing in descriptions of landscapes, and abstains altogether from skyscapes, if I may be allowed the phrase. I mean such pictures as Black undertakes in The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton ; and the author of The Wreck of the Grosvenor, in his maritime tales. In one of the most popular of living novelists I find, among others, this extravaganza: “In the whole crystalline hollow, gleaming and flowing with delight, yet waiting for more, the Psyche was the only life-bearing thing, the one cloudy germ spot afloat in the bosom of the great roc-egg of the sea and sky, whose sheltering nest was the universe with its walls of flame.” What classic writer would have perpetrated this amazing bombast ?

The choicest examples of the classic style in modern English literature, I should say, are Swift, Defoe, Goldsmith, and more recently Landor, the last of the classicists.

If in these comments I have seemed to disparage the romantic style in comparison with the classic, I desire to correct that impression. The two are very different, but neither can be said, in the abstract and on universal grounds, to be better than the other, — better in and for every province of literature. For history one may prefer the cold reserve and colorless simplicity of the classic style, where the medium is lost in the object, as the light which makes all things visible is itself unseen. In poetry, on the other hand, the inwardness, the sentimental intensity, the subjective coloring, of the romantic style constitute a peculiar charm which is wanting in the classic. This charm in Childe Harold, for example, abundantly compensates the absence of pure objective painting which one might expect in a descriptive poem.

Romantic relates to classic somewhat as music relates to plastic art. How is it that painting and sculpture affect us ? They arrest contemplation and occupy the mind with one defined whole. In that contemplation our whole being is for the time bound up. Consciousness excludes all else. Past and future are merged in the now, real and ideal are blended in one. Music, on the contrary, not only presents no definite object of contemplation, but just so far as it takes possession of us precludes contemplation ; it allows no pause. Instead of arresting attention by something fixed, it carries attention away with it on its own irresistible current. It presents no finished ideal, but suggests ideals beyond the capacity of canvas or stone. Plastic art acts on the intellect, music on the feelings ; the one affects us by what it presents, the other by what it suggests.

This, it seems to me, is essentially the difference between classic and romantic poetry. I need but name Homer and Milton as examples of the one, and Scott or Shelley as representative of the other. Instead of occupying the mind with well-defined images, romantic poetry crosses it with “ thick-coming” fancies.

Rhyme, a characteristic property of modern poetry, favors this tendency, hindering clearness and fixedness of impression, perpetually breaking the images it presents, as the ripples which chase each other on the surface of a lake, though beautiful in themselves, prevent clear reflections of sky and shore. The classic poet is satisfied if his language exactly cover the idea; the romantic would give his words, in addition to their logical and etymological import, a suggestive interest; they must not only indicate the things intended, but must be the keynotes to certain associations which he himself connects with them. The first couplet of the Corsair, —

is not so much intended to paint the ocean as to convey the feeling which that element inspired in the poet. Of the same character are those lines in Scott’s Rokeby : —

In his Mazeppa, Byron puts into the hero’s mouth the following experience of sunrise : —

We have here no distinct image of sunrise, such as a classic poet would present, but we have, what is better, the sensations with which the phenomenon is watched by the unfortunate victim. It is not the vision, but the heart’s response to it, which the lines convey.

The analogy with music is aptly illustrated by the larger function which sound performs in romantic verse. The best passages of Paradise Lost would lose little if rendered in prose ; but what would become of Scott, Moore, and Byron, if stripped of prosody and rhyme? All poetry by its rhythmical form addresses itself to the ear, but romantic poetry depends so much on the coöperation of that organ — on sound if read aloud, or the representation of sound if read silently — for its true appreciation that a deaf-and-dumb reader would lose the better part of the enjoyment we derive from such pieces as The Burial of Sir John Moore and Campbell’s lyrics. To deny that this musical charm of romantic poetry is an excellence is to contradict the æsthetic consciousness of the greater part of the reading world, and to pass condemnation on some of the most cherished productions of literary art. By how much music is more potent than painting, by so much romantic poetry will exercise an influence surpassing that of the classic on the popular mind.

Goethe in his Helena, an episode which constitutes the third act of the Second Part of Faust, has attempted a reconciliation of the controversy then raging between the classicists and romanticists as to the comparative merits of either style, by showing that love of the beautiful and interest in life are common to both, and that what distinguishes them is merely formal and accidental. Helena represents classic beauty, Faust represents modern culture; Lynceus, the ancient pilot of the Argonauts, officiates as mediator between the two. Dialogue and chorus proceed, after classic fashion, in unrhymed verse until Lynceus appears on the stage. He announces the advent of the romantic by discoursing in rhyme. Helena declares herself pleased with that new style of verse, where sound matches sound and the verses “ kiss each other.” She asks how she may learn to discourse in such pleasant wise. Faust answers, it is very easy; it is the natural language of the heart. He begins, —

(Pause. Helena breaks in)

So they play crambo until Helena has caught the trick.

Goethe seems to have meant by this that the beauty of ancient poetic art, so extolled by the classicists, can take on a modern form without loss of what is most essential in it; and on the other hand, that the deeper feeling which characterizes the romantic — the language of the heart — may ally itself with classic elegance, and add a new charm to antique beauty.

Much of the symbolism of this strange poem (for the Helena is a poem, complete in itself) is obscure, and some of it misleading. In strict consistency, Euphorion, the offspring of Helena and Faust, ought to represent the fusion of the classic and romantic in one. And such appears to have been Goethe’s meaning. But Euphorion confessedly stands for Byron; and Byron is simply and wholly romantic, with no tincture of classicism in his nature or works.

Not Byron, but Goethe himself, above all modern poets, combines the two under one imperial name. What is most characteristic in each kind may be found in unsurpassed perfection in the ample treasury of his works. Nay, in a single work; for is not the First Part of Faust the very essence of romance, and is not the larger portion of the Second Part a reproduction of the classic Muse ?

The Iphigenie auf Tauris was called an echo of Greek song ; but a still purer classicism meets us in the Elegies, in the Pandora, and in the Alexis and Dora. What a gulf divides these compositions from the Sorrows of Werther! There Goethe anticipates by a quarter of a century the rise of the Romantic School in Germany, which was nearly contemporaneous with the same fashion in England: inaugurated in the latter country by Scott, in the former by Novalis and Tieck. The birth-years, respectively, of these three poets, Scott, Novalis, and Tieck, are 71, 72, 73 of the eighteenth century. The Sorrows of Werther first appeared, I think, in 1772.

When I say that Scott inaugurated romanticism in England, and Novalis and Tieck in Germany, I do not mean that the new turn which poetry took in those countries was due to them alone. The movement had a deeper origin than personal caprice, or the efforts of a clique. The revolution in literature was the outcome of a revolution in the spirit of the age, of which these writers were the unconscious exponents. Literature and life are never far asunder. Every age enacts itself twice : first in its acts and events, then in its writings. The struggles and aspirations which agitated Europe at the close of the eighteenth century elicited an echo in the breasts of her poets. The French Revolution, following our own, electrified the nations, causing them to thrill and heave as never before since the Protestant Reformation. It startled England out of her placid acquiescence in the pompous pedantry of Johnson and the boasted supremacy of Addison and Pope. In Germany it roused a protest against the shallow Aufklärung of the Universal German Library. Its effect in England was conspicuous in a richer diction, recovering somewhat of the opulence of the Elizabethan age. In Germany it made itself manifest in a more believing spirit and a deeper tone of thought.

Other influences conspired to this end. The publication of the Reliques of Ancient Poetry, by Bishop Percy, in 1765, presented, in the strains of the old romantic time, a refreshing contrast with the polished tameness of contemporary verse. A similar service was rendered in Germany (Lessing having broken the spell of French classicism) by Herder’s publication of the Cid, his Völkerstimmen, his Andenken an einige ältere deutsche Dichter; by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim’s publication of Des Knaben Wunderhorn ; by Wieland’s Oberon ; and by the reëditing of the Nibelungenlied.

Another power on the side of romanticism, not commonly recognized, was Ossian. The poems bearing this name were given to the public a short time previous to Percy’s Reliques, in 1763, and made a great sensation, partly on account of their novelty, and partly because of their reputed source. The ardor with which they were welcomed in England was soon damped, it is true, by doubts concerning their authenticity. The English people are constitutionally afraid of being “ gulled,” and when Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of the day, pronounced them spurious, they were indignantly cast aside ; as if the authorship, and not the character of the poetry, determined its value. The question of genuineness does not concern us in this connection; all I have to say about it is that if McPherson wrote Ossian he had a good deal more poetic feeling than most of the poets of his time, certainly a good deal more than Dr. Johnson had. In spite of all objectors. Wordsworth included, who condemns the poems on technical grounds, they have the effect of poetry on most readers. If they do not satisfy the critical sense, they breathe a poetic aura, and awaken poetic feeling in the breast. Nothing else can explain the enthusiasm with which at first they were everywhere received. On the Continent, especially, where no question of authorship interfered, they charmed unprejudiced minds. But what particularly concerns us here is the romantic tone of these compositions. Whether uttered by an ancient Celtic bard, or composed by a modern antiquary, they were thoroughly romantic, and confirmed the romantic tendency of the time. Napoleon, in whose rocky nature a wild flower of romance had found some cleft to blossom in, carried them with him in his expeditions, as Alexander did their literary antipodes, the Iliad and Odyssey.

A marked feature of modern romanticism is love of the past, that passionate regret for by-gone fashions which prompts the attempt to patch the new garment of to-day with the old cloth of former wear. The feeling which, early in this century, found inspiration in mediæval lore, and loved to present the old chivalrics in novel and song, is the same which inspires the practical anachronisms of recent time, which in England seeks to reproduce the old ecclesiastical sanctities, which astonishes American cities with a mimicry of Gothic architecture ; the same which forty years ago restored the long - disused beard, which now ransacks second-hand furniture stores and remote farmhouses for claw-footed tables and brass-handled bureaus, which drags from the lumber-room the obsolete spinning-wheel, which rejoices in many-cornered dwelling-houses with diminutive window panes, — the more unshapely the better, because the more picturesque. A mania, innocent enough in these manifestations, but in its essence identical with that which inspired the knight of La Mancha, the typical example for all generations of romanticism gone wild.

It would be unjust, however, to maintain that the reaching back after old things is the sum of romanticism, as if what we so name were mere conservatism or reactionism. This worship of the past is only an accidental manifestation of a principle whose most comprehensive term is aspiration ; a noble discontent and disdain of the present, which, in the absence of creative genius, of power to originate new forms, seeks relief in the past from the weary commonplace of the day.

The essence of romanticism is aspiration. Whether it look backward or forward, there is in it a spirit of adventure : as much of it in the crusaders who sought a sepulchre in the east as in the Spanish navigators who sought an Eldorado in the west; as much in the arctic explorers who would force a way through eternal frost as in the Knights of the Holy Grail ; as much in the nineteenth century as in the twelfth, in Garibaldi and Gordon as in Godfrey and Tancred.

The romantic schools of German and English literature were transient phases already outgrown ; but the principle of romanticism in literature is immortal, — it is the spirit asserting itself through the form. Classicism gives us perfection of form, romanticism fullness of spirit. Both are essential, seldom found united, but both must combine to constitute a masterpiece of literary art.

Frederic Henry Hedge.