Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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It is in the terrible tragedy of Rousseau, in [252] fact, that French
romanticism, with much else, begins: reading his Confessions we seem
actually to assist at the birth of this new, strong spirit in the
French mind. The wildness which has shocked so many, and the
fascination which has influenced almost every one, in the squalid,
yet eloquent figure, we see and hear so clearly in that book,
wandering under the apple-blossoms and among the vines of Neuchatel
or Vevey actually give it the quality of a very successful romantic
invention. His strangeness or distortion, his profound subjectivity,
his passionateness--the cor laceratum--Rousseau makes all men in love
with these. Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai sus. Mais
si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre. "I am not made like
any one else I have ever known: yet, if I am not better, at least I
am different." These words, from the first page of the Confessions,
anticipate all the Werthers, Renes, Obermanns, of the last hundred
years. For Rousseau did but anticipate a trouble in the spirit of
the whole world; and thirty years afterwards, what in him was a
peculiarity, became part of the general consciousness. A storm was
coming: Rousseau, with others, felt it in the air, and they helped to
bring it down: they introduced a disturbing element into French
literature, then so trim and formal, like our own literature of the
age of Queen Anne.

In 1815 the storm had come and gone, but had left, in the spirit of
"young France," the [253] ennui of an immense disillusion. In the
last chapter of Edgar Quinet's Revolution Francaise, a work itself
full of irony, of disillusion, he distinguishes two books,
Senancour's Obermann and Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme, as
characteristic of the first decade of the present century. In those
two books we detect already the disease and the cure--in Obermann the
irony, refined into a plaintive philosophy of "indifference"--in
Chateaubriand's Genie du Christianisme, the refuge from a tarnished
actual present, a present of disillusion, into a world of strength
and beauty in the Middle Age, as at an earlier period--in Rene and
Atala--into the free play of them in savage life. It is to minds in
this spiritual situation, weary of the present, but yearning for the
spectacle of beauty and strength, that the works of French
romanticism appeal. They set a positive value on the intense, the
exceptional; and a certain distortion is sometimes noticeable in
them, as in conceptions like Victor Hugo's Quasimodo, or Gwynplaine,
something of a terrible grotesque, of the macabre, as the French
themselves call it; though always combined with perfect literary
execution, as in Gautier's La Morte Amoureuse, or the scene of the
"maimed" burial-rites of the player, dead of the frost, in his
Capitaine Fracasse--true "flowers of the yew." It becomes grim
humour in Victor Hugo's combat of Gilliatt with the devil-fish, or
the incident, with all its ghastly comedy drawn [254] out at length,
of the great gun detached from its fastenings on shipboard, in
Quatre-Vingt-Trieze (perhaps the most terrible of all the accidents
that can happen by sea) and in the entire episode, in that book, of
the Convention. Not less surely does it reach a genuine pathos; for
the habit of noting and distinguishing one's own most intimate
passages of sentiment makes one sympathetic, begetting, as it must,
the power of entering, by all sorts of finer ways, into the intimate
recesses of other minds; so that pity is another quality of
romanticism, both Victor Hugo and Gautier being great lovers of
animals, and charming writers about them, and Murger being unrivalled
in the pathos of his Scenes de la Vie de Jeunesse. Penetrating so
finely into all situations which appeal to pity, above all, into the
special or exceptional phases of such feeling, the romantic humour is
not afraid of the quaintness or singularity of its circumstances or
expression, pity, indeed, being of the essence of humour; so that
Victor Hugo does but turn his romanticism into practice, in his
hunger and thirst after practical Justice!--a justice which shall no
longer wrong children, or animals, for instance, by ignoring in a
stupid, mere breadth of view, minute facts about them. Yet the
romanticists are antinomian, too, sometimes, because the love of
energy and beauty, of distinction in passion, tended naturally to
become a little bizarre, plunging into the [255] Middle Age, into the
secrets of old Italian story. Are we in the Inferno?--we are tempted
to ask, wondering at something malign in so much beauty. For over
all a care for the refreshment of the human spirit by fine art
manifests itself, a predominant sense of literary charm, so that, in
their search for the secret of exquisite expression, the romantic
school went back to the forgotten world of early French poetry, and
literature itself became the most delicate of the arts--like
"goldsmith's work," says Sainte-Beuve, of Bertrand's Gaspard de la
Nuit--and that peculiarly French gift, the gift of exquisite speech,
argute loqui, attained in them a perfection which it had never seen
before.

Stendhal, a writer whom I have already quoted, and of whom English
readers might well know much more than they do, stands between the
earlier and later growths of the romantic spirit. His novels are
rich in romantic quality; and his other writings--partly criticism,
partly personal reminiscences--are a very curious and interesting
illustration of the needs out of which romanticism arose. In his
book on Racine and Shakespeare, Stendhal argues that all good art was
romantic in its day; and this is perhaps true in Stendhal's sense.
That little treatise, full of "dry light" and fertile ideas, was
published in the year 1823, and its object is to defend an entire
independence and liberty in the choice and treatment of subject, both
in [256] art and literature, against those who upheld the exclusive
authority of precedent. In pleading the cause of romanticism,
therefore, it is the novelty, both of form and of motive, in writings
like the Hernani of Victor Hugo (which soon followed it, raising a
storm of criticism) that he is chiefly concerned to justify. To be
interesting and really stimulating, to keep us from yawning even, art
and literature must follow the subtle movements of that nimbly-
shifting Time-Spirit, or Zeit-Geist, understood by French not less
than by German criticism, which is always modifying men's taste, as
it modifies their manners and their pleasures. This, he contends, is
what all great workmen had always understood. Dante, Shakespeare,
Moliere, had exercised an absolute independence in their choice of
subject and treatment. To turn always with that ever-changing
spirit, yet to retain the flavour of what was admirably done in past
generations, in the classics, as we say--is the problem of true
romanticism. "Dante," he observes, "was pre-eminently the romantic
poet. He adored Virgil, yet he wrote the Divine Comedy, with the
episode of Ugolino, which is as unlike the Aeneid as can possibly be.
And those who thus obey the fundamental principle of romanticism, one
by one become classical, and are joined to that ever-increasing
common league, formed by men of all countries, to approach nearer and
nearer to perfection."

Romanticism, then, although it has its epochs, [257] is in its
essential characteristics rather a spirit which shows itself at all
times, in various degrees, in individual workmen and their work, and
the amount of which criticism has to estimate in them taken one by
one, than the peculiarity of a time or a school. Depending on the
varying proportion of curiosity and the desire of beauty, natural
tendencies of the artistic spirit at all times, it must always be
partly a matter of individual temperament. The eighteenth century in
England has been regarded as almost exclusively a classical period;
yet William Blake, a type of so much which breaks through what are
conventionally thought the influences of that century, is still a
noticeable phenomenon in it, and the reaction in favour of naturalism
in poetry begins in that century, early. There are, thus, the born
romanticists and the born classicists. There are the born
classicists who start with form, to whose minds the comeliness of the
old, immemorial, well-recognised types in art and literature, have
revealed themselves impressively; who will entertain no matter which
will not go easily and flexibly into them; whose work aspires only to
be a variation upon, or study from, the older masters. "'Tis art's
decline, my son!" they are always saying, to the progressive element
in their own generation; to those who care for that which in fifty
years' time every one will be caring for. On the other hand, there
are the born romanticists, who start with an original, [258] untried
matter, still in fusion; who conceive this vividly, and hold by it as
the essence of their work; who, by the very vividness and heat of
their conception, purge away, sooner or later, all that is not
organically appropriate to it, till the whole effect adjusts itself
in clear, orderly, proportionate form; which form, after a very
little time, becomes classical in its turn.

The romantic or classical character of a picture, a poem, a literary
work, depends, then, on the balance of certain qualities in it; and
in this sense, a very real distinction may be drawn between good
classical and good romantic work. But all critical terms are
relative; and there is at least a valuable suggestion in that theory
of Stendhal's, that all good art was romantic in its day. In the
beauties of Homer and Pheidias, quiet as they now seem, there must
have been, for those who confronted them for the first time,
excitement and surprise, the sudden, unforeseen satisfaction of the
desire of beauty. Yet the Odyssey, with its marvellous adventure, is
more romantic than the Iliad, which nevertheless contains, among many
other romantic episodes, that of the immortal horses of Achilles, who
weep at the death of Patroclus. Aeschylus is more romantic than
Sophocles, whose Philoctetes, were it written now, might figure, for
the strangeness of its motive and the perfectness of its execution,
as typically romantic; while, of Euripides, it may be said, that his
method in [259] writing his plays is to sacrifice readily almost
everything else, so that he may attain the fulness of a single
romantic effect. These two tendencies, indeed, might be applied as a
measure or standard, all through Greek and Roman art and poetry, with
very illuminating results; and for an analyst of the romantic
principle in art, no exercise would be more profitable, than to walk
through the collection of classical antiquities at the Louvre, or the
British Museum, or to examine some representative collection of Greek
coins, and note how the element of curiosity, of the love of
strangeness, insinuates itself into classical design, and record the
effects of the romantic spirit there, the traces of struggle, of the
grotesque even, though over-balanced here by sweetness; as in the
sculpture of Chartres and Rheims, the real sweetness of mind in the
sculptor is often overbalanced by the grotesque, by the rudeness of
his strength.

Classicism, then, means for Stendhal, for that younger enthusiastic
band of French writers whose unconscious method he formulated into
principles, the reign of what is pedantic, conventional, and narrowly
academical in art; for him, all good art is romantic. To Sainte-
Beuve, who understands the term in a more liberal sense, it is the
characteristic of certain epochs, of certain spirits in every epoch,
not given to the exercise of original imagination, but rather to the
working out of refinements of manner on some [260] authorised matter;
and who bring to their perfection, in this way, the elements of
sanity, of order and beauty in manner. In general criticism, again,
it means the spirit of Greece and Rome, of some phases in literature
and art that may seem of equal authority with Greece and Rome, the
age of Louis the Fourteenth, the age of Johnson; though this is at
best an uncritical use of the term, because in Greek and Roman work
there are typical examples of the romantic spirit. But explain the
terms as we may, in application to particular epochs, there are these
two elements always recognisable; united in perfect art--in
Sophocles, in Dante, in the highest work of Goethe, though not always
absolutely balanced there; and these two elements may be not
inappropriately termed the classical and romantic tendencies.

Material for the artist, motives of inspiration, are not yet
exhausted: our curious, complex, aspiring age still abounds in
subjects for aesthetic manipulation by the literary as well as by
other forms of art. For the literary art, at all events, the problem
just now is, to induce order upon the contorted, proportionless
accumulation of our knowledge and experience, our science and
history, our hopes and disillusion, and, in effecting this, to do
consciously what has been done hitherto for the most part too
unconsciously, to write our English language as the Latins wrote
theirs, as the [261] French write, as scholars should write.
Appealing, as he may, to precedent in this matter, the scholar will
still remember that if "the style is the man" it is also the age:
that the nineteenth century too will be found to have had its style,
justified by necessity--a style very different, alike from the
baldness of an impossible "Queen Anne" revival, and an incorrect,
incondite exuberance, after the mode of Elizabeth: that we can only
return to either at the price of an impoverishment of form or matter,
or both, although, an intellectually rich age such as ours being
necessarily an eclectic one, we may well cultivate some of the
excellences of literary types so different as those: that in
literature as in other matters it is well to unite as many diverse
elements as may be: that the individual writer or artist, certainly,
is to be estimated by the number of graces he combines, and his power
of interpenetrating them in a given work. To discriminate schools,
of art, of literature, is, of course, part of the obvious business of
literary criticism: but, in the work of literary production, it is
easy to be overmuch occupied concerning them. For, in truth, the
legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art
against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the
stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is
dead to form.

NOTES

241. +Transliteration: ainei de palaion men oinon, anthea d' hymnon
neoteron. Translation: "Praise wine for its age, but the song in first
bloom. Pindar, Odes, Book O, Poem 9, Line 47.

244. +Transliteration: kosmiotes. Liddell and Scott definition:
"propriety, decorum, orderly behavior."

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