leading, and have hitherto caused the most vexatious confusion." *

Some of the sources of this confusion will be considered presently. Meanwhile the passage recalls the fact that romantic, when used as a term in literary nomenclature, is not an independent, but a referential word. It implies its opposite, the classic; and the ingenuity of critics has been taxed to its uttermost to explain and develop the numerous points of contrast. To form a thorough conception of the romantic, therefore, we must also form some conception of the classic. Now there is an obvious unlikeness between the thought and art of the nations of pagan antiquity and the thought and art of the peoples of Christian, feudal Europe. Everyone will agree to call the Parthenon, the "Diana" of the Louvre, the "Edipus " of Sophocles, the orations of Demosthenes classical; and to call the cathedral of Chartres, the walls of Nuremberg-die Perle des Mittelalters—the "Legenda Aurea" of Jacobus de Voragine, the "Tristan und Isolde" of Gottfried of Strasburg, and the illuminations in a Catholic missal of the thirteenth century romantic.

The same unlikeness is found between modern works conceived in the spirit, or executed in direct imitation, of ancient and medieval art respectively. It is easy to decide that Flaxman's outline drawings in illustration of Homer are classic; that Alfieri's tragedies, Goethe's "Iphigenie auf Tauris" Landor's "Hellenics," Gibson's statues, David's paintings, and the church of the Madeleine in Paris are classical, at least in intention and in the models which they follow; while Victor Hugo's "Notre Dame de Paris," Scott's "The Romantic School" (Fleishman's translation), p. 13.

"Ivanhoe," Fouqué's "Der Zauberring," and Rossetti's painting, "The Girlhood of Mary," are no less certainly romantic in their inspiration.

But critics have given a wider extension than this to the terms classic and romantic. They have discerned, or imagined, certain qualities, attitudes of mind, ways of thinking and feeling, traits of style which distinguish classic from romantic art; and they have applied the words accordingly to work which is not necessarily either antique or mediæval in subject. Thus it is assumed, for example, that the productions of Greek and Roman genius were characterized by clearness, simplicity, restraint, unity of design, subordination of the part to the whole; and therefore modern works which make this impression of noble plainness and severity, of harmony in construction, economy of means and clear, definite outline, are often spoken of as classical, quite irrespective of the historical period which they have to do with. In this sense, it is usual to say that Wordsworth's "Michael" is classical, or that Goethe's "Hermann und Dorothea" is classical; though Wordsworth may be celebrating the virtues of a Westmoreland shepherd, and Goethe telling the story of two rustic lovers on the German border at the time of the Napoleonic

wars.

On the other hand, it is asserted that the work of mediæval poets and artists is 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 Shelley 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. *

Contrariwise the word romantic, as popularly employed, expresses a shade of disapprobation. The

* Un classique est tout artiste à l'école de qui nous pouvons nous mettre sans craindre que ses leçons ou ses exemples nous fourvoient. Ou encore, c'est celui qui possède . . . des qualités dont l'imitation, si elle ne peut pas faire de bien, ne peut pas non plus faire de mal. -F. Brunetière, “Études Critiques," Tome III. p. 300.

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, in a period which considered itself classical, 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;* 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 preeminent degree." "The charm, then, of what is

* Mr. Perry thinks that one of the first instances of the use of the word romantic is by the diarist Evelyn in 1654: "There is also, on the side of this horrid alp, a very romantic seat."—English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, by Thomas Sergeant Perry, p. 148, note. + "Romanticism," Macmillan's Magazine, Vol. XXXV.